House Democrats push towards carbon tax bill
House Democrats continued their efforts towards a carbon tax bill during a Thursday hearing on decarbonization despite continued opposition from their Republican counterparts and few signs their efforts will be taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate.
Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee drew support from several experts for efforts to reduce carbon emissions with some kind of “carbon price” but Republicans on the panel continued to worry about the costs of a carbon tax and the need to coordinate decarbonization efforts with the world’s other big carbon emitters, China, India and Russia.
“If the cost burden is put on us with no international restraint,” said U.S. Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), “it will indicate we will do this for nothing. (Energy) costs will be increased and the industries that will be charged will pass these costs on. It’s just simple economics.”
But Democrats on the panel, including Chairman Paul Tonka, (D-NY), insisted that plans to introduce a carbon tax (the Democrats have eight bills addressing the proposal) must be combined with technology incentives and coordinated with the international community in order to maximize any hope to reduce worldwide carbon emissions.
The lawmakers and experts were speaking during the subcommittee’s eighth hearing on reducing carbon emissions, this one called, “Building a 100 Percent Clean Economy: Solutions for Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization.” The first seven hearings focused on specific industries or initiatives. This one focused on a national solution.
The hearing came two days after the World Meteorological Organization issued its annual state of the global climate report, concluding a decade of what it called exceptional global heat. “It’s more urgent than ever to proceed with mitigation,” the report concluded.
Noah Kaufman, a scholar with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told lawmakers a carbon tax should be part of a comprehensive climate policy because it will create a financial incentive for consumers to seek lower-carbon solutions.
Daniel Esty, director of the Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University, said to decarbonize the economy at the speed and scale necessary to tackle climate change “will require a portfolio of policies — some of which entail economy-wide initiatives, including carbon pricing, but others of which might be advanced within specific sectors on a more targeted basis.” He said a carbon tax could be phased in at low prices initially, which “would make the burden on consumers and businesses modest in the early years, thereby ensuring that companies, communities, and families alike would have time to transition toward cleaner energy options and encouraging them to get on board the decarbonization train rather than seeking to derail it.”
But even some of the Democrats on the panel expressed concerns about the burdens a carbon tax will pose on low-income Americans. U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragan (D-CA) gave Chairman Tonka a letter signed by 33 environmental justice groups who oppose a carbon tax based on those concerns.
Columbia’s Kaufman called a carbon tax a “no brainer” because it will “speed up decarbonization” and agreed that any carbon tax has to consider the ability of consumers to pay the costs and their effects on coal-producing communities.
U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) said the state’s own cap-and-trade regulation was structured to take into consideration the ability to pay.
Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, endorsed a carbon tax and suggested that any national policy initiatives could be supported by a 50-state climate strategy that supports the role of states in cutting emissions, a system that allows for the differences between the states. “Instead of attempting to settle all concerns about a program’s costs and impacts at the federal level, Congress could determine the national level of reductions needed to achieve our climate goals and then divvy up that goal to the states,” said Profeta. “State governments, which are more in touch with the equitable tradeoffs of their populations and directly accountable to their communities, would then be empowered to execute plans to reach those goals.”
Republicans on the panel seemed to coalesce behind the position of nuclear power advocate David Gattie, associate professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security, who insisted that even if the U.S. is successful in meeting its goals of reducing its carbon footprint by 2050 it would only bring worldwide levels of carbon back to their 2006 level. Rep. Shimkus, the ranking Republican on the panel, agreed with Gattie and said even if the U.S. is successful in meeting its goals for carbon reductions it will still be vulnerable to global warming because of the other major contributors.
Gattie insisted that any plans for reducing carbon emissions must include more incentives for the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. energy mix. Unless the U.S. begins to undertake new nuclear power projects it faces the likelihood of being overtaken in the field by the Russians and the Chinese, Gattie warned.
U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said a carbon tax would price U.S. energy out of the world market and “put us at a competitive disadvantage.” “This is a global issue, not just an American issue, and it needs a global solution,” said McMorris Rodgers. She agreed with Gattie that U.S. energy policy needs the addition of more nuclear power plants.
U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) expressed gratitude that Republicans on the committee agree on the need to act to affect global warming but she said the U.S. cannot wait for an international consensus to act. “I’m concerned by the implication that since it’s an international problem we should sit around and do nothing,” said DeGette.
