Letter to the Editor

New York Times: Congress and a Carbon Fee

By William C. Eacho

Re “The Silver Lining of Leaving Paris” (editorial, June 2):

While everyone on the planet should be grateful that various American states and cities are taking responsibility for fighting global warming, the world’s richest country must simply find the will to enact a national solution.

The quickest, most efficient and most potent solution, according to economists, is a carbon fee. Since air pollution, climate change and other problems are caused by burning carbon, the price of carbon should include the costs that those problems impose on all of us and on our economy.

If Congress put a fee on carbon emissions, the free market would accelerate the shift toward sources like solar and wind power. And one price for carbon would make much more sense than a variety of prices set by states.

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Washington Post: Making the price of carbon more honest

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By George T. Frampton Jr., Co-founder of the Partnership for Responsible Growth.

A Pigouvian tax. That’s the common-sense response to Fred Hiatt’s plea in his Feb. 12 op-ed, “Don’t celebrate the budget deal. It imperils America,” that Congress “fund” the nation’s priorities. Such a levy, named for British economist Arthur Pigou, is intended to correct an inefficient market outcome.

We subsidize the burning of carbon. We all pay later for lung cancer, asthma, heart disease and the lost productivity resulting from these diseases. Its price does not include the costs of more frequent and more intense hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters that climate change is exacerbating.

By honestly pricing carbon, we could accelerate the inevitable transition to clean energy and reduce carbon’s increasingly high costs to society. Doing so would provide a second benefit: A $49-per-metric-ton fee, increasing by 2 percent a year over inflation, would generate $2.1 trillion over 10 years. Even after rebating a portion of that to lower- and middle-income households to compensate them for slightly higher energy costs, there would still be more than $1 trillion left to reduce the fast-rising national debt and address our infrastructure needs.

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TRAVERSE CITY (MICHIGAN) RECORD-EAGLE: CLIMATE CHANGE

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Letter to the Editor

Wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, heat wave. It’s time to take action on climate change, and residents of Michigan’s largest congressional district should be pleased that their representative in Congress, Jack Bergman, has just joined the House Climate Solutions Caucus. He is the first member from Michigan.

Many people think that all Republicans are climate change skeptics. In fact, half of the 60 members of this caucus are Republicans.

Their interest in this challenge reflects growing concern in the party. For example, 62 percent of Trump voters support taxing and/or regulating the pollution that causes global warming, according to a Yale survey, and that was before Hurricane Harvey hit Houston.

If we are to make significant progress on climate change, this caucus will have to provide some of the leadership.

We hope that Congressman Bergman can help persuade his colleagues to engage in the art of compromise that legislators are paid to perform. Here’s one idea for this fall: To pay for tax cuts, enact a carbon fee to accelerate the shift to clean energy.

George T. Frampton, Jr.

Co-founder, Partnership for Responsible Growth

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The Washington Post: Advantages of a Carbon Fee

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The No. 1 reason that a carbon fee (or tax) has political potential is that it offers Congress flexibility. Lawmakers could opt for the Shultz and Summers’s proposal and treat all their constituents to a quarterly dividend. Or they could use the sizable revenue such a fee would generate to reduce the high corporate tax rate or some other tax. Yet another option is to plow that money into infrastructure, aid for coal-dependent communities, clean energy and other priorities.

Like Congress, the business community can also see value in such a fee, as illustrated by the support of General Motors, ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble and other major corporations. Its simplicity, efficiency and reliance on the free market make a carbon fee superior to other climate-change solutions, and business executives are not in denial about the changing climate. Let’s hope that the business community will use its influence to convince Congress that pricing carbon is not only good for Americans’ health but is also smart economics and smart politics.

William C. Eacho, Washington

The writer is co-founder of the Partnership for Responsible Growth.

 

Washington Post: In Support of a Carbon Tax

Washington Post: In Support of a Carbon Tax

The Feb. 9 article “GOP statesmen propose replacing Obama climate policies with carbon tax” failed to remind readers of a compelling reason — highly relevant to the current debate over tax reform — that a carbon tax is the most workable approach to addressing carbon emissions. Any regime we adopt must have a means to impose our “carbon price” on imports. If not, we can expect major producers of climate gases (e.g., steel furnaces) to be replaced by plants in low-carbon-cost countries (long known as “leakage”).

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Washington Post: The Crisis of Climate Change

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Dear Editor,

If the president is open to taking the advice in Todd Stern’s Jan. 25 op-ed, “The deal of the century on climate,” he should do so by pursuing the one option that would also help him deliver on tax reform and infrastructure. That option is a carbon fee, which a large majority of economists (and our incoming secretary of state) say is the quickest, most efficient and most potent solution to climate change. If Congress finally puts a price on carbon emissions, the free market will drive down the use of carbon. That’s what Canada is doing