Dancing around the carbon tax in the United States Senate

Climate and climate policy are more than moderately complicated issues, as we all are well aware. But at the end of the day we know too there are a certain >number of basic underlying truths that shape these issues and outcomes, which one either grasps or one does not. And in this regard, there can be little doubt that the most single powerful single lever available for slowing down climate damage is carbon-reduction -- and by far the most powerful way to achieve this is through a well-fashioned carbon tax. You put a price on carbon emissions, a high price preferably, and you can be sure that they will come down. Economics 101. But say this to a hundred bright people, and 99 will immediately, without losing a beat, look you in the eye and start to list all the reasons why this cannot be done. But it can be done.

And when it comes to our bailiwick here on World Streets, namely sustainable transport and sustainable cities, what we get with these carbon reductions are many of the things we need to do anyway to move toward these broader goals. Higher fossil fuel prices work to reduce motorized traffic. That's a pretty good start because less traffic on our roads means less environment damage, reduced pressures on scarce natural resources, fewer traffic fatalities, quieter and safer cities, improved public health, economic renewal, stronger communities and world peace. But once we have that carbon tax in place, we then need to use all our ingenuity and efforts to ensure social equity, protect the economy and create better and fairer mobility systems for all. Which of course is what World Streets is all about. Now let's hear what Charles Komanoff of New York City has to say about how the US Senate is facing up to these challenges.

Cap-and-trade, let us hope, is dead. And now, we may begin!

- by Charles Komanof

And now, ve may begin?

Readers of a certain age, and a certain literary bent, will recognize the words of Alexander Portnoy’s psychiatrist, spoken at the close of Philip Roth’s transgressive 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.

After lo these many years, they popped into my head today as I read that Senate Democrats had finally thrown in the towel on an energy bill that would have included a partial cap-and-trade provision for limiting carbon emissions from power plants. The bill, written by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, was touted by Washington insiders and some major environmental groups as this year’s last hope for federal climate legislation. Yet it would have relied on carbon offsets and other dodges to postpone the day of reckoning with true, visible carbon emissions pricing — the cornerstone of meaningful climate policy.

Instead, reported the New York Times, Senate Democrats will pursue a limited bill aimed at increasing oversight of oil drilling and tightening energy efficiency standards — with no direct assault on climate-destabilizing CO2. (For a later Times story amplifying the first, click here.)

Yes, now, we may begin — “we” being Americans who care about climate, sustainability, and Earth — to unite around a climate approach that is effective, equitable and transparent enough to win the support of our fellow citizens and a Congressional majority.

I’m referring of course to the idea advanced by climatologist Jim Hansen as fee-and-dividend and by the Carbon Tax Center as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, by which fossil fuel extractors and importers pay the U.S. Treasury fees pegged to the carbon content of the coal, oil and gas they take from the ground or bring into U.S. ports, and the Treasury distributes the revenues to all Americans via equal monthly dividends (“green checks”), or by tax-shifting from regressive taxes such as payroll taxes.

The Senate’s antipathy to even the partial cap-and-trade proposed by Sen. Kerry will doubtless be spun as indicating that for the foreseeable future the well for climate legislation has been poisoned. The Carbon Tax Center says that the opposite may be true: with cap-and-trade out of the way at last, the political well can begin to be de-toxified so that the effective, equitable and transparent carbon fee-and-dividend can be seriously considered.

For this to happen, however, the Big Green groups like EDF and NRDC that for years have dominated climate discourse among environmentalists, and that convinced Congressional Democrats and the White House that the only way to “put a price on carbon” in America was via carbon cap-and-trade, will have to abandon that approach and allow others, and themselves, to try a fresh start.

It will be said that cap-and-trade failed because Fox News and other climate deniers branded it as “cap-and-tax” and, therefore, a carbon tax (or fee) cannot possibly succeed. And it is true that carbon cap-and-trade was looked to, years ago, as a way to build on the success of acid rain cap-and-trade, win over Republican free-marketers, and put a price on carbon without having to parade the dreaded t-a-x word before the public.

In the event, though, carbon cap-and-trade did none of these things.

Instead, Big Green’s pursuit of carbon cap-and-trade tethered the climate movement to complex financial instruments and branded us as servants of Wall Street elites. It opened the legislative floodgates to off-the-charts Beltway deal-making that rightly repulsed the public. Perhaps most importantly, the co-optation of climate advocacy by the cap-and-traders robbed us of the high moral ground we might have shared with abolitionists, suffragists, labor agitators and civil rights workers — true American heroes who fought to liberate our society of oppression and injustice.

If you’re in the climate movement, you recognize that fossil fuels’ assault on Earth’s climate is an ultimate form of oppression and injustice: of rich against poor, of the profligate against the frugal, of the present against the future. Ending this assault will require concerted action on many fronts; and it starts by internalizing the climate-damage costs of coal, oil and gas into their prices, so that the free ride for fossil fuels is ended and all of the alternatives, from energy efficiency, renewable energy and low-carbon fuels to conservation-based behavior and mindfulness toward energy consumption, may compete fairly and effectively.

Political action to accomplish this must be done in bright sunlight, not in Beltway shadows.

Cap-and-trade, let us hope, is dead. And now, we may begin!

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About the author:

Charles Komanoff “re-founded” NYC’s bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives in the 1980s, helped found the Tri-State Transportation Campaign in the 1990s, and co-founded the Carbon Tax Center in 2007. Charles’s writings include books, articles, and landmark reports such as Subsidies for Traffic, Killed By Automobile, and the Kheel Report on financing free transit in New York City. A math-and-economics graduate of Harvard, Charles lives with his wife and two sons in lower Manhattan.

A first round of comments are available on this piece were published on the 22nd and can be accessed here.

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The Changing Context for NGO Campaigning

The consistent two-punch theme of World Streets is that (a) we are losing the sustainability wars (no argument there, eh?) because (b) we are quite simply not very bright. Look, how complicated can it be? When it comes to the issues of sustainable transport we really do know what to do (i.e., get our act together and start to rip carbon out of the system, and do it now). But we are somehow not able to get our fundamental messages across. We also have this communication problem. So when someone like Keith Sutter from Sydney has an idea for us, well we listen and try to learn. Let's have a look and see if we can learn something.

THE NEW ERA OF NGO CAMPAIGNING: THE CHANGING CONTEXT FOR CAMPAIGNING

I was asked recently to comment on some proposed campaigns by an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO). Here are some general comments on the way that the campaigning context today is now much more complicated than it was.

1. From “Broadcasting” to “Narrowcasting”

One change has been the move from “broadcasting” (a small number of, for example, TV stations transmitting to a large number of people) to “narrowcasting” (a large number of TV stations transmitting to a narrow, specific group of people).

I joke in my speeches that if a stranger in a capital city (with a large number of potential radio stations to choose from) were first to tell me about which is their favourite radio station, then I would quickly know a lot about them. For example, a person who listens to a “serious talk” publicly-funded radio station is unlikely to also listen to commercial contemporary music stations

Alongside the traditional media, we now of course also have the social media eg Facebook: even more “narrowcasting”.

In summary, I suggest we have “de-massified” society so that it is now impossible to fashion one standard message that will suit - or reach - all audiences at any one time.

2. Who are the “opinion formers” now?

In the old days, it was usually necessary to reach only a small number of senior people (usually pale, stale, males) to change government policy. These were often called the “opinion formers”: people (usually men) with a disproportionate amount of influence in the media.

Now it is necessary to operate across a variety of media, targeting a variety of people because in a de-massified society it is no longer possible to always see who has the power to influence others.

“You never know which piece of coal blows the whistle”. You can never be sure what event or form of media coverage could trigger an avalanche.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon is a good example. The video clip of her stunning appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” reached Australia a day after it was broadcast in the UK (via Internet users forwarding it on) and by Thursday of the same week it had become the most watched You Tube clip that day in the US. By the following weekend she was in negotiations over a recording contract. She had become a global “hit” in about a week.

In summary, I suggest an NGO needs to use a variety of media to reach a variety of people with a variety of messages (albeit around a common theme). The “down-market” commercial media and social networks are just as important as the “serious” publicly-funded media outlets,

3. Rise of Epistemic Communities

A by-product of the de-massified society is the rise of epistemic communities: where people think the same thoughts and only communicate with each other in that same small group. Despite the alleged internationalizing effects of globalization, we still live in small communities – only now they cross national borders. An Indian legal expert, for example, may have more in common with follow legal experts in (say) the US or Europe, than with the peasants outside that person’s own home.

The global financial crisis is a good example of this. The finance industry all had the same ideas about how to make money and ignored the warnings of “outside” people, for example, those concerned about society getting into too much debt. Meanwhile the financial regulators (often in the same capital city district a few blocks away) failed to do their own job because they were in their own epistemic community.

The implication here is that the urgency that members of an environmental NGO may feel for their own particular issue may be not shared by most other people in other epistemic communities.
In the example of environmental NGO campaigns, most people in western countries would probably feel that everyday life is actually getting better and that there is not much of an environmental problem. They do not share the fears of environmental NGOs which may be worried about, for example, climate change. Indeed, I grew up in post-war London – the evil, thick fogs of my childhood have long since gone and the Thames is cleaner now than when I was a child. I happen to share the concerns of environmental NGOs but I can also see how a person in my situation could easily claim that life is getting better and better compared with what they would have known in their childhood.

The risk is that environmental campaigners speak only to their own fellow members (in their own epistemic community) and so they don’t reach a wider audience.

4. From “Leaders” to “Followers”

Traditionally “leaders” would stake out their point of view and invite potential followers to get behind them. For example Winston Churchill in the 1930s warned the British about the German menace and he was ignored. But then in 1939/1940 suddenly the British turned to him for leadership and he became Prime Minister in May 1940.

Now we have “followers” – leaders wait to see where the crowd is running and then run in front of the crowd and claim that they have always had that point of view. They will often replay back to the crowd the fears of that crowd. As the crowd changes its mind, so the “leaders” will change theirs.

A standard example of this process is the “war on terror”. The risk of being killed by terrorists in western countries has been greatly exaggerated (the average American stands a far higher chance of being killed through food poisoning). But thanks to the saturation media coverage, there is a perception among the public that there is a high risk of dying in a terrorist attack and so the politicians heed that fear by replaying the fears back to the voters and have introduced overly elaborate security measures.

The Washington DC-based German journalist Gabor Steingart has even warned that the “war on terror” is a diversion from the real threats to the US. “…our fears have been spun out of proportion. The Taliban consists of military dwarves and political pygmies. A country like Iran, with the gross domestic product the size of Connecticut’s and a military budget only as big as Sweden’s, doesn’t deserve the attention of the entire American public and its government”. The real issue is not so much terrorism as the comparative decline of the US economy and the rise of the Asian powers such as China .

If the leaders perceive that the environment (or any other issue) as not being of any real interest to the voters, then they won’t to give leadership on it.

5. Rise of “Info-Tainment”

A fifth change has reflected the growing comfort of media consumers. Life is a great deal easier now for most people in all western countries. The appalling poverty and violence that marred their lives has been reduced; even a black man can become of President of the United States (which would have been unthinkable, say, in 1970 only 40 years ago).
This progress has led to changes in the media. In the 1930s, 1940s and then the Cold War (1945-91) the news could kill you. The Great Depression of the 1930s; followed in the early 1940s by the possible invasion by German, Italian or Japanese dictators (depending on where one lived); and then after World War II the threat of nuclear war were all, so to speak, “bad news”.

Now the news is not nearly so “bad”. There has been, for example, a reduction in international conventional warfare. The most dangerous period to have lived in the past 110 years was 1900-50; since then the number of wars and the number of people killed in them have both declined. Terrorism, as noted above, is not a major cause of death in the western world. The “bad” news is in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere all outside the western world – and those areas hardly rate a mention (unless western tourists accidentally get caught up in the foreign violence).

Therefore, we have moved from serious media reporting and discussion of “big issues” and “bad news”, to entertainment items such “lifestyle”, sport and cooking food. The news is a mixture of light information and entertainment: “info-tainment”.

In summary, environmental NGOs began their campaigns in the late 1960s/ early 1970s at a time when western media consumers were also hearing other “bad” news. It all seemed of one piece – the possible “end of the world” by either nuclear weapons or environmental destruction.

Now there is far less appetite for “bad” news. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the scepticism about climate change – the warnings seem now so distant and so abstract compared with the earlier risks of war. The planet evaded a nuclear World War III and so many people feel assured that the environmental warnings are equally misplaced.

I think that optimism may be misplaced and that the planet is facing grave resource shortages etc. But it means that environmental messages need to be refashioned to be effective.

6. From “Head” to “Heart”

To conclude, environmental NGOs (and all other NGOs) are now operating in a new media and political context. Here is a final comment on lobbying.

Traditionally, NGOs have gone for the “head”: trying to meet ministers to convey their point of view etc. This was a “Buchanesque” world. John Buchan (1875-1940) was a popular Scottish novelist (eg “The 39 Steps”) and then Governor-General of Canada. His many novels depicted a world where the “good guys” (and usually they were wealthy, well educated white men) were well-connected, members of the right London clubs, knew the right people and could muster resources that the average person could not – in order to defeat the “bad guys” (such as German spies).

NGOs lived with a “Buchanesque” paradigm. If they could only meet the right ministers and present them with logical arguments then they hoped to change policy. If the polite approach didn’t work, they could try to get the attention of the politicians with demonstrations.

I suggest NGOs need to move from the “head” to the “heart”. In other words, who actually makes policy? It is not the ministers at the top because they often now don’t really understand what is going on. Life is now so complicated. The skills of politicians are in winning elections and not getting a detailed grasp of the details of policies.

A good example of this process is the way in which “new right economic rationalist economics”/ “free market economics” replaced the traditional Keynesian approach to national government economic policy. The revolution began with conservative leaders in the US (Ronald Reagan) and the UK (Margaret Thatcher) and Labor leaders in Australia (Bob Hawke and Paul Keating) and New Zealand (David Lange and Roger Douglas). The party labels made little difference – they were all reading from similar scripts.

Who wrote those scripts? The “technostructure” - in John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase (The New Industrial State, 19867) – did the work. The politicians simply did the talking.

Martin Feil, a former senior Australian bureaucrat, has recounted his experiences: “I have never been to a meeting with ministers where advisers and public servants were not present; often the minister’s only contribution has been to say “Hello” and “Goodbye”. I appreciate that captains of industry have private audiences with political decision-makers, but I wonder about the efficacy of such meetings. The billionaire or CEO often isn’t across the detail of what he wants to know or ask for, and the minister doesn’t necessarily know what he is talking about and may have difficulty relaying the substance and purpose of the meeting to his advisers” .

The implication here I suggest is that NGOs need to spend more time with the “script writers” working within the “heart” of the bureaucracy, such as serving on government.

There will still be a need for some NGOs to have an “impolite” approach (such as with demonstrations) because they draw the debate’s options far more out to one end (and reduce the risk of epistemic thinking). Other NGOs can present the ‘heart” with more “moderate” options and so gradually shift government policy.

Will it work if the world is facing a looming environmental catastrophe? Do we have enough time? British writer HG Wells is reputed to have said that life is a race between education and disaster. A century later that is still the case. We just need to find new ways of doing the “educating”.

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About the author

Keith Suter is a futurist and media personality in the areas of social policy and foreign affairs. His first doctorate was in the international law of guerrilla warfare and his second in the economic and social consequences of the arms race. He is a member of the Club of Rome, President of the United Nations Association (NSW) and President of the Society for International Development (Sydney Chapter). He lives in Sydney Australia and can be via webeditor@keithsuter.com. .

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COP15: Getting transport into the climate agenda SLoCaT: Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport

The Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport - SLoCaT - was established to provide opportunities for coordination and cooperation among organizations working on sustainable, low carbon transport. The goal of the Partnership is to get transport into the heart of the COP15 agenda. World Streets and the New Mobility Agenda are proud to support this most timely initiative.

Transport in developing countries is the one of the largest, and fastest growing, source of GHG emissions. At the same time transport is largely missing in climate change mitigation policies and actions worldwide. This is linked to an overall lack of sustainability expressed by poor urban planning, increased motorization, increased air pollution and noise, growing congestion and decreasing road safety.

The SLoCaT Partnership activities improve the knowledge on sustainable low carbon transport, help develop better policies and catalyze their implementation. Over 40 organizations have joined the Partnership, including UN organizations, multilateral development banks, technical cooperation agencies, NGOs, research organizations and other organizations.

The Partnership has 4 main objectives:

1. Contributing to sustainable development and the millennium development goals especially by providing access to or for goods and services by lower income groups.

2. The integration of climate considerations in regional, national and local transport policies,

3. The integration of sustainable, low carbon transport in climate change negotiations, and

4. Mainstreaming Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport in strategies and operations of international development organizations.

The Partnership has a multi-stakeholder membership representing development
organizations, intergovernmental organizations, governmental organizations, NGOs, private sector, and academe.

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Membership

SLoCaT Partnership Members are committed to work towards sustainable, low carbon transport at the global, regional, national and local level.

* African Development Bank (AfDB)
* Asian Development Bank (ADB)
* Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF)
* Center for Clean Air Policy (CCAP)
* Centre for Environment Planning & Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad
* Center for Science and Environment (CSE)
* Center for Sustainable Transport (CTS) Mexico*
* Center for Transportation and Logistics Studies (PUSTRAL), Gadjah Mada University
* Civic Exchange (CE)
* Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia) Center
* Clean Air Institute (CAI)
* German Technical Cooperation (GTZ)
* EMBARQ, The WRI Center for Sustainable Transport
* Energy Research Center Netherlands (ECN)
* Global Environmental Facility (GEF)
* Global Transport Knowledge Partnership (gTKP)
* Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
* Interface for Cycling Expertise (I-CE)
* International Association for Public Transport (UITP)
* International Energy Agency (IEA)
* International Transport Forum (ITF)
* International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
* International Union of Railways (UIC)
* Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)
* Institute for Transport Policy Studies (ITPS)
* Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP)
* Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP) Europe
* Institute of Transport Studies (ITS), University of California, Davis
* Korean Transport Institute (KOTI)
* Ministry of Land Infrastructure Transport and Tourism, Japan
* National Center for Transportation Studies (NCTS), Philippines
* Rockefeller Foundation
* Society of Indian Automotive Manufacturers (SIAM)
* Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)
* The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
* Transport and Environment (T+E)
* Transport Research Laboratory (TRL)
* United Nations Center for Regional Development (UNCRD)
* United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA)
* United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
* University College of London, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
* University of Transport and Communication (UTCC) Hanoi
* VEOLIA Transport
* World Streets
* WWF International

Do you see your organization listed there? If not, scroll down just below and you will see how to sign in to support this worthy cause.

Latest news:

If you look to the left column you will see that the latest news from SLoCaT appears under our "Latest World Streets Daily News Leads" rubric. We invite you to check it out when you visit here, especially in these days at a time when we are on the very rough road to sustainability that passes next week through Copenhagen,.

To join the SLoCaT Partnership please contact the Joint Conveners: Tom Hamlin, (Hamlin[at]un.org), or Cornie Huizenga (cornie.huizenga[at]slocatpartnership.org)

For all the latest information, check out their new website at www.slocat.net.

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Archives: Sonnet for the Neighborhood Democratic Caucus. In Honor of Kenneth Ewart Boulding

Paris. Nov. 1994: Kenneth Boulding, 1909-1993, was one of the magisterial figures in the field of social science of the second half of the twentieth century. In the last two years of his life, he took to writing sonnets, 216 in all between 1981 and 1993. We have taken one of these to sound the theme for our collaborative knowledge-building enterprise here on World Streets: "how to turn a heterogeneous caucus into a choir, singing the same good song, So, to democracy all should be turning When it is not just voting, but group learning."


Sonnet for the Neighborhood Democratic Caucus

They come -- a somewhat miscellaneous group
Of people gathered from the neighborhood.
Some may be naive -- some are fairly good
At jumping through the somewhat twisted hoop
Of politics -- not getting in the soup
Of disagreement, finding where they stood
On touchy issues that might mean they could
Lose the election; learning when to stoop,

And when to stand against a blatant wrong,
When to be quiet, when a little raucous,
And how to turn a heterogeneous caucus
Into a choir, singing the same good song,

So, to democracy all should be turning
When it is not just voting, but group learning.

- Kenneth Boulding, Boulder, Colorado, 14 April 1992

Who was Kenneth Boulding?

Professor Boulding was internationally known for his innovative and sensitive work in the field of economics, Along with the presidency of five other major scholarly societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science ,he was elected as president of the American Economics Association. He taught at universities on three continents, wrote more than thirty significant books and hundreds of articles, pamphlets and papers, and was awarded numerous honors for his work not only as an economist pushing the forefront of his profession, but also as a humanist, futures thinker and major activist in the field of peace and conflict resolution.

Ken Boulding was a profoundly democratic man, a Quaker (the Society of Friends), a loving and diligent work partner with his wife, the eminent Norwegian-born sociologist Dr. Elise Boulding, and both a worrier (about our ability to survive the challenges of the modern world) and an optimist (he decided to dedicate his life to doing something about it anyway).

Books in Print by Kenneth Boulding

The following lists the available titles of books by Ken Boulding from Books in Print. They can be ordered through your local book dealer which is what I am sure he would have preferred) or of course any of the booksellers that ply the net.

• The Future: Images & Processes
• The Future: Images & Prophecies
• National Images & International Systems
• Structure Of A Modern Economy
• There Is A Spirit: The Nayless Sonnets $4.50
• Toward A New Economics
• Three Faces Of Power
• Conflict And Defense
• Economics As A Science
• Meaning Of The 20th Century
• Beyond The Bomb
• Mending The World: Quaker insights on the social order
• Economics Of Human Betterment
• The World As A Total System
• The Organizational Revolution: A Study In The Ethics Of Economic Organization
• Preface To Grants Economics
• Evolutionary Economics
• Disarmament And The Economy
• Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution
• Redistribution Through The Financial System
• Stable Peace
• Economics Of Peace
• Peace And The War Industry
• Mayer Boulding Dialogue On Peace Research
• The Evolutionary Potential Of Quakerism
• The Image: Knowledge In Life And Society
• New Nations For Old
• Collected Papers Of Kenneth E. Boulding
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Editor - Late night thoughts:

Late last night as I was tossing, turning and thinking about how we are going to be able to find a way to continue World Streets, my thoughts turned to Ken Boulding, who in his latter years also had his active mind at times keeping him up in the middle of the night. What he did often on those occasions was to click on the bedside lamp, pick up a pen and quietly write notes -- but also from time to time one more of his several hundred sonnets, including the one you can see here. (His dear wife, Elise Boulding, told me about this when I called to ask her permission concerning the following.)

It was back in late 1994, one year after Professor Boulding's death, when we were just cranking up the first iteration of our collaborative web presence (see http://www.xability.com/commons/comdedic.htm), that I decided to seek permission to dedicate the first year of our new worldwide group learning enterprise and "somewhat miscellaneous group" in honor of Professor Boulding, whose work had marked me deeply back in the days when I was something of an economist stretching for new ideas and clues about why people do the things they do. I contacted his wife, Mrs. Elise Boulding, who kindly gave me permission to do just that.

Today, fifteen full years later and at a time when competence in matters of world peace and conflict resolution have rarely been so important, his poem, his work and his example come to mind. "To democracy all should be turning. When it is not just voting, but group learning."

That sounds to me much like what you, dear reader, and we are trying to do here. And you will I am sre agree: we have to try a lot harder. This is a challenge we should not fail.

Eric Britton, Paris

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