US Senators generally support corporate interests rather than environmental quality

From an Article by Mark K. Mathews, E&E News, March 6, 2019

Senators Lisa Murkowski (R–AK, right) and Joe Manchin (D–WV, left), the senior members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, confer during a hearing yesterday on climate change.

It’s been some time since the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has held a hearing on climate change, so naturally its top two lawmakers felt compelled to get a couple of things out of the way during yesterday’s roughly two-hour meeting.

Global warming is “directly impacting our way of life,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who leads the panel.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat, added, “There’s no doubt that humans have made a tremendous impact on what we’re dealing with.” It’s a baseline of understanding that, by now, seems obvious to most climate scientists. But it was a milestone moment for the Senate panel.

Manchin said yesterday was the first time since 2012 the committee had held a hearing on climate change. (In response, a Republican aide pushed back with the argument that climate change is a frequent topic of discussion on the panel.)

Irrespective of the timeline, Manchin and Murkowski both represent states that lean heavily on the energy industry, and their simple acknowledgement of the climate crisis yesterday was enough to draw small applause from some corners.

“It is significant that we even had the hearing—particularly when you have two leaders on the committee, both of whom come from fossil fuel states,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said in an interview afterward. “There were some differences on the level of urgency, but I think the underlying premise is that this is something we have to deal with.”

Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C., had a similar takeaway. The “hearing was notable because it actually occurred,” she said. “It is a good day when a Republican-led committee actually listens to experts about real climate impacts, clean energy and innovation.”

But Pierce added this caveat: “This wasn’t revolutionary in terms of setting an agenda for bold action, but it was a start.”

Indeed, the committee mostly skimmed over potential solutions—touching on ideas such as microgrids, carbon capture technology and better energy efficiency for buildings. As the main thrust of the hearing was about climate change and the electricity sector, Murkowski made sure to note also that a reduction in carbon emissions is only part of her committee’s responsibility.

“As more renewables come online … our committee will focus on maintaining grid reliability and resiliency,” she said. “We’ll prioritize keeping energy affordable, [and] we’ll be working to advance cleaner energy technologies that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Manchin wanted to make clear, too, that he was skeptical of efforts to dramatically shrink the United States’ carbon footprint in the near future. “Solutions must be grounded in reality, which requires the recognition that fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere anytime soon,” he said.

At another point in the hearing, he noted the vast reserves of natural gas beneath his home state. “We have an ocean of gas under us in West Virginia—an ocean of gas,” he said.

Neither of these comments is likely to assuage the concerns of climate hawks, but they do suggest there could be a window for Congress to make small changes to energy policy in the short term.

“Responsible Republicans and Democrats are considering realistic, durable solutions to the issue,” said Alex Flint, executive director of the conservative Alliance for Market Solutions in Washington, D.C., which backs the idea of using a carbon tax to fight global warming. “They represent the evolving state of climate change politics.”

It’s unlikely, however, that any recommendation from the Senate committee will approach the scale of something like the Green New Deal, which supporters argue is the only way to head off the worst effects of climate change.

Murkowski said, “We do have a considerable role to play in developing reasonable policies that can draw bipartisan support that I think will be a pragmatic contribution to the overall discussion.”

She specifically cited topics such as new research and energy efficiency. “I think you’ll likely see these as subjects of further discussion,” she added.

.. WVU College of Law Professor .. James Van Nostrand

From an Article by Chelsi Baker, WVU College of Law, November 12, 2018

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — The 2018 National Energy Conference at WVU Law on December 1st will focus on climate change.

Admission is free and the public is invited to attend. Online registration is required at: energy.law.wvu.edu/nec18

Topics to be discussed at the conference include the latest developments in climate change issues, climate change communication, controlling methane emissions, putting a price on carbon, and solar energy opportunities and obstacles. The speakers are national and regional experts from industry, public policy organizations, environmental groups, and academia.

Emily Calandrelli, an Emmy-nominated science TV host, will deliver the keynote speech. She is a correspondent on “Bill Nye Saves the World” on Netflix and an executive producer and host of FOX’s “Xploration Outer Space.” Calandrelli is a 2010 WVU graduate.

Rafe Pomerance, chairman of Arctic 21 and former president of Friends of the Earth, will deliver the conference’s closing remarks.

The 2018 National Energy Conference is hosted by WVU Law’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development, Friends of Blackwater, and the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation.

According to law professor James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development, it is important to have honest communication about climate change to learn about climate science and how to make climate-friendly policy choices.

“Experts agree on the importance of controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and bipartisan efforts have paved the way for financial incentives for climate-friendly technologies,” said Van Nostrand. “But citizens, public agencies, businesses, scientists and community leaders must all play an informed role in addressing climate change to help fully tackle the technical, legal, financial, regulatory and political aspects of the issue.”

Among the conference speakers are Kurt Waltzer of the Clean Air Task Force; Andrew Williams of the Environmental Defense Fund; Kenneth Davis, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University; Autumn Long of Solar United Neighbors; Amy Hessl, a WVU geographer and paleoclimatologist; Joshua Fershee, a WVU law professor; Jim Probst of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby; and Michael Svoboda, a professor at George Washington University.

- WVU College of Law -

Carbon pricing schemes double since 2012 in climate fight: World Bank

From an Article by Alister Doyle, Reuters (Oslo), September 9, 2015

The number of carbon pricing schemes worldwide has almost doubled since 2012 but most taxes or markets have prices too low to prevent damaging global warming, the World Bank said on Sunday.

Carbon pricing, including emissions trading schemes from California to China, now covers about 12 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in a sign of momentum before a U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December, it said.

The number of carbon pricing instruments, both implemented or planned, has risen to 38 from 20 since 2012, it said. South Korea began carbon trading this year, for instance, and both Chile and South Africa plan taxes on carbon emissions.

“There is a growing sense of inevitability … that there will be a price on carbon” for governments and businesses, Rachel Kyte, a vice president and special envoy for climate change at the World Bank, told a telephone new conference.

The study showed that prices, meant to shift investments from fossil fuels toward cleaner energies such as wind or solar power, ranged from less than a dollar a tonne of carbon dioxide in Mexico to $130 a tonne in Sweden.

In more than 85 percent of cases the price was less than $10, “considerably lower”, the report said, than levels needed to help limit temperature rises to a U.N. goal of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

The World Bank did not suggest a target price.

The combined value of the carbon pricing instruments was estimated at $50 billion a year worldwide, with $34 billion from markets and the other $16 billion in taxes.

A year ago, 73 countries and more than 1,000 companies and investors called for a price on carbon. Kyte said the group was becoming a “powerful coalition” that would make announcements before Paris. She gave no details.

A parallel report by the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with input from the International Monetary Fund, also laid out new principles for carbon pricing that it called FASTER.

“Carbon pricing is central to the quest for a cost-effective transition toward zero net emissions in the second half of the century,” said Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD.

FASTER stands for Fairness, Alignment of policies and objectives, Stability and predictability, Transparency, Efficiency and cost effectiveness and Reliability and environmental integrity.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

NOAA: Global Temperature Change

Bipartisan Plaudits for Rep. Delaney’s “Tax Pollution, Not Profits Act”

From an Article by James Handley, Carbon Tax Center, August 12, 2015

If any climate legislation could garner at least nominal bipartisan support, it might be Rep. John Delaney’s Tax Pollution, Not Profits Act. Delaney is in his second term representing Maryland’s 6th CD, which runs from the DC suburbs to the western end of the state.

His proposal, introduced on Earth Day at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, would tax carbon dioxide and CO2 equivalents from methane and other sources at a rate of $30 per metric ton, increasing annually at 4% above inflation. The measure includes border tax adjustments to protect energy-intensive domestic industry from unfair competition from nations that haven’t enacted carbon taxes.

Delaney’s measure offers a sweetener to conservatives: a promise to apply roughly half of carbon tax revenues to reduce the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 28%. The bill would also provide monthly payments to low- and middle-income households and fund job training, early retirement and health care benefits for coal workers.

At least as critically, at the AEI unveiling, Delaney committed near-apostasy by suggesting that his carbon tax could substitute for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, final regulations for which EPA issued last month.

The Carbon Tax Center assessed the Delaney proposal’s effectiveness using our 7-sector model. We project that in its third full year the measure’s $30 price would reduce U.S. CO2 emissions to 8% below emissions in the year before enactment.

Unfortunately, its schedule of 4% annual real rises is too tepid to continue reducing emissions more than fractionally over the longer term. The low upward price trajectory is a shortcoming shared by the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, introduced by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) in June.

In contrast, carbon tax proposals introduced in this Congress by Rep. John Larson (D-CT) and Rep. James McDermott (D-WA) would rise briskly to exceed $100 per metric ton within a decade, which we estimate would reduce U.S. emissions below this year’s levels by more than one-fourth in that time (and by nearly a third below 2005 emissions).

In an online discussion forum hosted by OurEnergyPolicy.org, Rep. Delaney asked for comments on his proposal. [These are summarized in the original article on the Carbon Tax Center web-site.]

Conclusion

Rep. Delaney’s “Tax Pollution, Not Profits Act” garnered strongly positive comments from a fairly broad range of advocates and analysts. Several agreed with Delaney’s suggestion to replace more costly and less effective policies with a carbon tax. The use of carbon tax revenue remains contentious, but economists commended Delaney’s “middle course” proposal which would devote roughly half the revenue to compensate low- and middle-income households while using the remaining revenue to cut distortionary taxes and spur economic growth.

Some commenters suggested that by itself, the Tax Pollution, Not Profits Act would fall short of the price signal needed to induce a broad, clean energy transformation. The Carbon Tax Center’s modeling supports this concern, primarily because of the proposal’s modest 4% annual increase in carbon prices. But if Rep. Delaney’s proposal were modified to include a more aggressive upward price trajectory, it could offer a promising route to a stable global climate.

>>>>>>>>>>>

See how a carbon tax works and why taxing carbon pollution must be the central policy to combat climate change:

Earth’s climate is changing in costly and painful ways. 2014 was the globe’s hottest year on record, and the dozen warmest have all come after 1997, as this graphic shows all too clearly.

Yet the transition from climate-damaging fossil fuels to energy efficiency, renewable sunlight and wind energy is slow and halting. The Number One obstacle is that the market prices of coal, oil and gas don’t include the true costs of carbon pollution. A briskly rising U.S. carbon tax will transform energy investment, re-shape consumption, and sharply reduce the carbon emissions that are driving global warming.

• A carbon tax is an “upstream” tax on the carbon contents of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) and biofuels.
• A carbon tax is the most efficient means to instill crucial price signals that spur carbon-reducing investment. Download our spreadsheet (Excel file) to input your own tax levels and see how fast U.S. emissions will fall.
• A carbon tax will raise fossil fuel prices — that’s the point. The impact on households can be softened through “dividends” (revenue distributions) and/or reducing other taxes that discourage hiring and investing (“tax-shifting or swapping”).
• Carbon taxing is an antidote to rigged energy pricing that helps fossil fuels destabilize earth’s climate. Unlike cap-and-trade, carbon taxes don’t create complex and easily-gamed“carbon markets” with allowances, trading and offsets.

>>>>>>>>>>>

See the chart displayed above: Globe not warming? Look again. CO2 from fossil fuel-burning not the cause? Click here.

Senators Whitehouse & Manchin at National Energy Technology Laboratory, Morgantown, WV

Sen. Whitehouse Proposes Carbon Tax to Repay Citizens for Pollution Costs

From an Article by Anstasia Pantsios, EcoWatch.com, October 29, 2014

Delivering a keynote address at the New York University Institute for Policy Integrity’s fall conference, in which he noted “The world has just set some dubious records. 2014 is on pace to tie or become the hottest year on record,” U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse announced that he plans to introduce legislation creating a carbon pollution fee next month. He said he will reveal details in the next few weeks.

It was an appropriate announcement to make at the conference whose theme this year was “The Future of U.S. Climate Policy: Coal, Carbon Markets and the Clean Air Act.”

“Pollution-driven climate change hurts our economy, damages our infrastructure and harms public health,” he told his audience. “However, none of these costs are factored into the price of the coal or oil that’s burned to release this carbon. The big oil and coal companies have offloaded those costs onto society.

Economics 101 tells us that’s a market failure; in the jargon, that negative externalities are inefficient. If a company participates in an activity that causes harm, it should have to compensate those harmed.”

“By making carbon pollution free, we subsidize fossil fuel companies to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars annually,” he continued. “By making carbon pollution free, we fix the game, favoring polluters over newer and cleaner technologies that harvest the wind, sun and waves. Corporate polluters, not bearing the costs of their products, are in effect cheating their competitors.”

The Rhode Island Democrat, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, has long been an advocate for climate change action. His official website features a page called “Climate Change: Time to Wake Up” and he has made more than 85 speeches in the Senate on the topic, giving one per week.

Whitehouse praised the Obama administration’s limit on carbon emissions from power plants, announced in June, saying “It will change the way polluters think.” But he’d like to take the next step of making polluters pay for their cost to society. He said that not only would it reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality, it would generate significant new revenue for the federal government, perhaps as much as two trillion dollars in the first decade.

He pointed to some of the positive uses that money could be applied to, including cutting taxes, relieving student debt, increasing Social Security benefits and providing transition assistance to workers in fossil fuel industries.

“It’s win-win-win,” he said. “We can use this revenue to do big things; repair a marketplace failure; and guide the economy toward lower emissions, enhanced productivity and a sustainable future.”

Whitehouse also drew a direct line between the Republican party’s increasingly stubborn climate denier stance and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed a gusher of corporate money into campaigns.

“Not long ago, Republicans joined Democrats in pushing for action on climate,” Whitehouse said. “Leading Republican voices agreed that the dangers of climate change were real. Leading Republican voices agreed that carbon emissions were the culprit. And leading Republican voices agreed that Congress had the responsibility to act. Then the heartbeat flatlined. Republican calls for climate action fell silent.

Something happened, right around 2010. It was the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—one of the court’s most disgraceful decisions. Improper fact-finding by the five conservative activists on the Supreme Court concluded that corporate spending could not ever corrupt elections—just couldn’t do it. By some magic, it’s pure.”

He says that although his Republican colleagues represent many states ravaged by its effects, “Most won’t even utter the words ‘climate change’ on the floor of the Senate at all. It’s not safe to, ever since Citizens United allowed the bullying, polluting special interests to bombard our elections with their attack ads and their threats.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Senator Manchin Hosts Tour of WV Energy Facilities for Senator Whitehouse

From a Press Release, U. S. Senate, Washington, DC, October 22, 2014

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) hosted Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in West Virginia to continue their ongoing discussions about finding meaningful solutions to balancing our nation’s energy needs with our environmental concerns. Senator Manchin emphasized the importance of developing new fossil fuel technology to continue producing affordable and reliable electricity, while steadily reducing carbon emissions and addressing the adverse effects of climate change. Senator Manchin toured several coastal areas of Rhode Island on October 10.

Due to inclement weather, travel restraints required the day’s agenda to be slightly readjusted. Senator Manchin and Senator Whitehouse toured the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to gather information about the facility’s development of groundbreaking energy projects, including details on how to operationalize carbon capture and storage.

Then, they traveled to Longview Power to learn about the advanced technologies at their coal-fired power plant. They also attended a briefing led by officials from Dominion Energy, American Electric Power and FirstEnergy to discuss the utility companies’ actions to produce cleaner power from their coal facilities and the impact stricter environmental regulations have on their ability to ensure reliable and affordable electricity throughout the region and this country. Finally, they met with officials from PJM Interconnection to hear about the importance of reliability to our nation’s electrical grid.

“It has been a pleasure showing Senator Whitehouse a few of our innovative energy facilities in West Virginia and continuing our discussions about the importance of investing in innovative technologies that can produce clean power while also making sure Americans are guaranteed affordable, reliable electricity,” Senator Manchin said. “We agree that we must face the reality of climate change without delay, but we also agree that fossil fuels will be a vital part of our energy portfolio for decades to come. Working together, I hope that we can find that balance and show not only America, but the world, that we can look past our differences to better this planet now and for our future.”

“I thank Senator Manchin for hosting me in the Mountain State today and for showing me the innovative work being done here to minimize carbon pollution from fossil fuels,” said Senator Whitehouse. “From improving energy efficiency and increasing renewable energy use to investing in technologies to capture and recycle carbon pollution, there is much we can do that will benefit both coastal states like Rhode Island and fossil-fuel-producing states like West Virginia. I look forward to continuing to work with Senator Manchin on these issues.”

Once Congress returns from its recess after the election season, Senators Manchin and Whitehouse will continue to work with the Department of Energy (DOE) to ensure its available $8 billion in loan guarantees and $1.7 billion in available advanced fossil grants are used to invest in innovative technologies, including those that capture, utilize, and sequester carbon dioxide.

Why a Carbon Tax Is Absolutely Essential to Combating Climate Change

From an Article by Thom Hartmann, EcoWatch.com, August 26, 2014

So, what does a major investment from Verizon Wireless and the melting of our polar ice caps have in common? A lot more than you may think. On Monday, America’s largest wireless provider announced that it will be making a $40 million investment in solar power at eight of its facilities across the U.S.

According to a press release from Verizon, new solar installations at facilities in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York will nearly double the amount of energy that Verizon gets from solar power. Speaking about the $40 million investment, Verizon’s chief sustainability officer James Gowen told Bloomberg that, “Solar is a proven technology. It didn’t hurt that the technology is getting better and prices are coming down.”

Last year, Verizon announced a similar $100 million investment in solar power and fuel cell technologies. These types of investments in clean and green forms of renewable energy from major U.S. corporations couldn’t come sooner. That’s because new research suggests that climate change and global warming are happening a lot faster than we first thought.

According to new data from a European space probe, our planet’s two largest ice sheets—in Greenland and Antarctica—are melting at unprecedented speeds. The CryoSat-2 space probe has discovered that the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are losing a stunning 120 cubic miles of ice each year. 

That’s a lot of ice that’s going from being frozen ice up on land into being river water flowing into the rising oceans. But more importantly, the rate of sea ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has more than doubled since 2009, which shows just how fast the processes of global warming and climate change have become. 

Speaking about the new and alarming data, Mark Drinkwater, mission scientist for the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission, said that, “These results offer a critical new perspective on the recent impact of climate change on large ice sheets. This is particularly evident in parts of the Antarctic peninsula, where some of the more remarkable features add testimony on the impact of sustained peninsula warming at rates several times the global average.”

And, it’s not just the sea ice in Greenland and Antarctica that’s melting at astonishing rates. Arctic sea ice is melting at unprecedented rates too. In fact, as Gaius Publius pointed out over at America Blog, just about every reputable projection on the loss of Arctic sea ice has been wrong.

The lack of sea ice cover in the Arctic that we’re seeing today wasn’t supposed to happen for 20+ more years according to 13 of the most accurate models. With more and more of our planet’s ice cover melting away at unprecedented rates, the question becomes: “Have we reached a tipping point?”

Have we reached the point where we can no longer hope to slow down or even stop the processes of climate change and global warming, and where do we have to prepare for the ongoing and worsening sea level rises on our coastlines?

The fact is, despite this new and alarming data from the CryoSat-2 probe, we still don’t if we’ve passed a tipping point or not. So, with that being the case, we need to slow down climate change and global warming, to protect our planet’s ability to support human life. 

One of those actions that we can take today is to put a carbon tax in place. Putting a price on carbon encourages less fossil fuel extraction and a rapid move to clean and green energy. With even a modest carbon tax—that doesn’t even end the subsidies to the big oil, coal, and gas companies – fossil fuels instantly become more expensive than renewables like wind and solar.

A report put out by the Citizens Climate Lobby shows that a $10 carbon tax would cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 28 percent of 2005 levels. That’s 11 percent more than the cut proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Clean Power Plan it announced back in June.

In our documentary Carbon, the first part of a four part series on climate change by Leonardo DiCaprio and yours truly that was released last week, some of the world’s leading climatologists and scientists talk about the importance of a carbon tax. They make it clear that, if we want to save our planet and the human race from the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, a carbon tax is absolutely essential. 

It’s that simple.

Henry Paulson, former Treasury Secretary

The Coming Climate Crash: Lessons for Climate Change

By Joe Romm, Think Progress, Climate Reality, June 22, 2014

There is an amazing op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, “The Coming Climate Crash: Lessons for Climate Change in the Past Recession.”

What’s amazing isn’t so much the content — the climate crisis is real, we’re close to crossing catastrophic and irreversible tipping points, we have the technology to start slashing carbon pollution now, and we need a carbon price to jumpstart the process. You’ve heard it many times from the nation’s and world’s top scientists, from Al Gore and Bill McKibben, and here on Climate Progress. But this piece is by Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury Secretary from July 2006 to January 2009 under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Whereas Tea-Party-driven Republicans on the Hill are stuck in denial, the ever-worsening reality of human caused climate change is leading even the most mainstream Republicans like Paulson to sing a much different tune.

We are building up excesses (debt in 2008, greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat now). Our government policies are flawed (incentivizing us to borrow too much to finance homes then, and encouraging the overuse of carbon-based fuels now). Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures. And the outsize risks have the potential to be tremendously damaging (to a globalized economy then, and the global climate now).

What are these outsize risks? Paulson explains that scientists have identified a number of “potential thresholds that, once crossed, could cause sweeping, irreversible changes.” He points out “already, observations are catching up with years of scientific models, and the trends are not in our favor.” And, Paulson notes, these changes are quickly accelerating in recent years. “Fewer than 10 years ago, the best analysis projected that melting Arctic sea ice would mean nearly ice-free summers by the end of the 21st century,” he writes. “Now the ice is melting so rapidly that virtually ice-free Arctic summers could be here in the next decade or two.”

Why is that bad? Because that leads to an amplifying feedback that speeds up atmospheric and ocean warming, “ultimately raising sea levels.” And we have a bigger problem at the other pole: “Even worse, in May, two separate studies discovered that one of the biggest thresholds has already been reached,” Paulson writes. “The West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt, a process that scientists estimate may take centuries but that could eventually raise sea levels by as much as 14 feet.”

Finally, Paulson warns, there’s every reason to expect that many other concerns of climate scientists will become painful reality in the years ahead: “And 10 years from now, will other thresholds be crossed that scientists are only now contemplating?”

But this is no economic doom and gloom message from the former Treasury Secretary. Rather, Paulson presents a choice between economic doom and economic boom. “We already have a head start on the technologies we need. The costs of the policies necessary to make the transition to an economy powered by clean energy are real, but modest relative to the risks,” he writes.

Although Paulson doesn’t mention it, the world’s leading scientists and governments agreed that the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is a mere 0.06 percent — relative to baseline growth of between 1.6 percent and 3 percent per year.

So, then what is the solution? Paulson is clear that “a tax on carbon emissions will unleash a wave of innovation to develop technologies, lower the costs of clean energy and create jobs as we and other nations develop new energy products and infrastructure.” In turn, he writes, “this would strengthen national security by reducing the world’s dependence on governments like Russia and Iran.”

The choice is apparent to all but the most extreme head-in-the-sand idealogues: We can learn from science and from the mistakes of the past, take on the “climate bubble” now, and unleash the power of innovation to spur the next industrial revolution. Or we can continue ignoring science and face a devastating “carbon crash” that will ravage the world far more than the recent economic crash — and irreversibly so.

.. getting down to business ..

Global Warming: An Ugly Peril

Editorial – The Charleston Gazette - August 6, 2013

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Last week, four major Republicans who each once headed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — William Ruckelshaus, Lee Thomas, William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman — called for the GOP to support President Obama’s effort to curb carbon pollution that causes global warming. In a New York Times commentary, they wrote: 

“There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: Our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting faster than projected. … Climate change puts all our progress and our successes at risk.”

Bravo. We hope these influential voices have an impact on Washington’s political paralysis.

In June, we shared the tale of Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican former congressman from South Carolina — and former climate change denier. Now, as executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University, he travels the country to support using market forces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Could it work? Inglis advocates taxing carbon at the source, such as mines and wells. High-carbon energy costs more to produce and to use than the market currently reflects. If those costs were accurately included in the price everyone pays, it would create an incentive to develop cleaner, cheaper energy.

A number of people seem to agree. In May, The Washington Post called a carbon tax “an elegant policy Congress could immediately take off the shelf.”

“It would make polluters pay for their own pollution, which is the best way to encourage greener thinking,” the Post said. “It would cut emissions without overspending national wealth on grandiose central planning.”

Inglis is among those who would want such a carbon tax to be revenue-neutral. He believes companies that would pay higher taxes on carbon should see other taxes reduced. The goal is to create incentive, not revenue.

But 67 percent of voters think taxing carbon is a better way to reduce the deficit than cutting spending, according to a survey of 1,000 voters conducted for Friends of the Earth. The poll found that 93 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans approved of such a tax.

Also, the Congressional Budget Office has warned that delaying efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions could mean “catastrophic” losses for the U.S. economy, as global warming causes more billion-dollar storms, floods and other ravages from climate change.

A carbon tax would have to be deftly handled in places like coal-rich West Virginia to curtail harm to working people and their families. But wouldn’t it be great to be part of innovation and the creation of new wealth and industry?

Elected officials who sit in Washington (or Charleston) with their fingers in their ears during discussion of climate change are out of touch. As one of the largest economies in the world, the United States should be leading on this reform.

The Washington Post put it best: “The carbon tax is one of the best ideas in Washington almost no one in Congress will talk about.”

NOTE: See also: www.EcoWatch.org