(2018-06-22) Energy Lobbyists Have A New Pac To Push For A Carbon Tax Wait What

Energy lobbyists have a new PAC to push for a carbon tax. Wait, what? The PAC is called Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD) and it is educating the public about, and lobbying for, a policy called carbon tax-and-dividend. More specifically, it is pushing a proposal that was released last year by a nonprofit called the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), led by former Secretary of State James Baker III. AFCD is effectively the lobbying arm of the CLC.

AFCD’s CEO, the centrist author and speaker Ted Halstead, has helped bring on board a who’s who of Washington insiders

It is first and foremost a bid by oil and gas and nuclear to secure the gentlest and most predictable possible energy transition.

More broadly, it is the US Climate Action Partnership all over again. That was the effort, starting around 2006, to develop a climate bill that big, polluting industries would support.

it yielded a compromised bill that no one loved, which died a lonely death in the Senate in 2010.

the biggest mistake of the 2008-era climate policy push was not the policy, it was the belief that corporate support is the key to climate policy.

This new PAC is a pure industry effort, a coalition of energy groups from almost every big energy sector except coal, backed by industry-friend lobbyists.

The oil and gas (fossil fuel) industry is trying to get ahead of the climate policy curve

there’s still the danger that Obama regulations like the Clean Power Plan could survive Donald Trump’s crude attempts to overturn them. (See Mike Grunwald on “the myth of Scott Pruitt’s EPA rollback.”)

This proposal is aimed at Democrats, not Republicans

These lobbyists know as well as anyone else that there is absolutely zero chance that today’s Republican Party will be involved in the passage of a new tax, a thing it hates above all else, to address a problem it views as a liberal fantasy.

There is no evidence that pricing carbon — the climate policy with the most transparently punitive effects on average voters — is the most popular climate strategy. In practice, it has proven quite difficult.

A climate policy seeking popularity will foreground goods, like renewable energy, which everyone loves, and leave the taxing of bads in the background, as a funding mechanism.

A price on carbon is a fine thing. But climate hawks should be designing their policies around the real political economy, in which multiple goals and strategies must be pursued at once