Senate Democrats abandoned any hope of passing a climate bill proposed by Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman late last week, but closure, in this case, is actually a good thing.
Their bill would have allowed for more offshore drilling, subsidies for coal and opportunities for polluters to purchase cheap and questionable carbon offsets. It would have also opened up a Wall Street approach to emissions trading, introducing further volatility to the price of energy. In short, we were headed down a path that would delay the steps we need to take to bring about effective change.
So now we have the chance to regroup and come up with a better solution in the next Congress, a “Plan B” if you will. To make that happen, however, requires a radically new approach.
As I look at the weak and ineffective proposals on the table in Washington, it becomes clear that legislation to control climate change is actually dictated by the people who are causing it. Maybe it’s time for decision-makers on Capitol Hill to hear from ordinary citizens like me, people whose only stake in this process is that we want a livable planet for our children and grandchildren.
That’s why I got on a plane in June and flew to Washington, where I joined 24 other volunteers with Citizens Climate Lobby and learned how to be a different kind of lobbyist. We went to the Hill for meetings with 52 House and Senate offices. We brought to those meetings a proposal supported, not by coal and oil companies or electric utilities, but by Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s leading climate scientist. Hansen calls it the People’s Climate Stewardship Act.
Utilizing an approach known as carbon fee and dividend, here’s how it works:
Put a steadily increasing fee on carbon dioxide emissions at the source -- the mine, well or port of entry -- and return 100 percent of the revenue equitably to all American households as a dividend. The dividend would help families cover the cost of the transition away from fossil fuels. This would allow 70 percent of the population to break even or get back more from the dividend than they would pay in increased energy costs.
How much of a dividend are we talking about? If the fee starts out at $15 per ton of CO2 and increases $10 a year, within a decade the annual per capita dividend would be about $1,500. A family of four would be getting back $6,000.
At that pricing level, the carbon fee would also make clean energy less expensive than fossil fuels within 10 years, unleashing a flood of investments in green technology and renewable energy. If a utility is then choosing between coal and wind for its next power plant, simple economics dictates that the choice is wind.
As we speed the transition to clean energy and encourage energy efficiency, millions of news jobs will be created. These are jobs geared toward the future instead of the past, and these renewable energy sources will make us less dependent on fuel from overseas.
What will it take to get a solution like this enacted by Congress? Do we have to wait for another disaster like the spill in the Gulf? Must we burn all the coal in the ground to find out if the ice caps really do disappear and see how far the sea water would rise to motivate us to transition away from our dependency on fossil fuels?
I hope not. I hope we remember that we were once the country that others looked to for leadership, and that we can be that country again.
In our hands we hold the legacy we leave for our children. We can leave a world falling apart because the glaciers that provide water for a billion people have vanished; because droughts have brought famine to millions; because rising oceans have displaced hundreds of millions of people; and because the seas that feed a billion people are dead.
Or we can leave a world that is clean and sustainable, capable of providing for the needs of every human being on Earth.
I prefer the latter, and that’s why I’ll be going back to Washington next June.
Bill Barron, a resident of Salt Lake City, is a volunteer with Citizens Climate Lobby.
