The River of No Escape, by Don Matheson
Just a reminder, since the popular news is dominated by terrorism, murders, and the politics of bathroom rights, that global warming continues apace.
Worldwide, 2015 broke the record for the hottest year in history. The previous record was set in 2014. Each month of 2016 has been the hottest of that month ever. In five of the last six months, the Arctic sea ice extent has set a record low for that month since recordkeeping began.
Glaciers and winter snowpack are shrinking at the same time. Bad news, since white ice reflects the sun’s heat back into space. Dark earth and oceans absorb heat. This is just one of the reasons scientists tell us the earth will warm twice as fast in the coming years as it did in the past.
It is very sad reading about people struggling to make up for what the world we used to live in provided for free — like the fishermen in southern Chile who were farming salmon, fish that were once provided in abundance by clean rivers and oceans. Twenty-three million of the fish died, as unusually warm ocean water resulted in a toxic algae bloom that wiped them out. (Sound familiar?) Horrible stinking mess.
The warm water also killed off a lot of phytoplankton, food for anchovies and sardines, which, in turn, are food for sea lions. Hundreds of dead sea lions washed up on the beach. One of a thousand stories. So it goes.
We’re now 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 1880. What a difference a degree and a half makes, huh? A direct quote from the Environmental Protection Agency: “By 2100, the average U.S. temperature is projected to increase by about 3°F to 12°F, depending on emissions scenario. . . .”
To explain that quote a bit, since it will take 30 years, in the best scenario, to wean the world from fossil fuels, an increase of 3 degrees is probably baked in. If we continue on our current path, it could be 12 degrees. The Department of Defense states that the unprecedented five-year drought in Syria was the fuse that set off rebellion and led, through the crucible of war, to the flood of Syrian refugees into Europe.
Extrapolating from that model and others, the world may become, at far less than 12 degrees of warming, an ungovernable patchwork of famine, genocide, and war. In other words, the mood of xenophobic bellicosity we see today, in this country and abroad, may be just the beginning of a predictable trend, a trend that will be accelerated and assured if climate change is allowed to continue unchecked. This is what the D.O.D. means when it calls climate change a “threat multiplier.”
Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change. Apparently, he does not talk with the D.O.D. He pledges to undo even the vastly inadequate measures President Obama has been able to put in place to address it. Thirty-one American scientific organizations recently wrote an open letter to Congress to reiterate their deep alarm, and to urge it to pass laws to immediately cut carbon emissions. The reaction of Congress was to drastically cut funding for science. Take that, science!
Humanity has not evolved since the Roman Inquisition put Galileo under house arrest for endorsing Copernicus’s idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Pity the grandchildren? Well, it has already begun. Who knew the privation of the 1930s would follow the roaring ’20s? Even those of us in our 60s may live long enough to be murdered for a loaf of bread.
Alternatives to fossil fuels exist and are already competitive in many places. Just one example: Gainesville, Tex., recently switched to all solar and wind because it will save money. The logical way to reduce emissions is to tax them enough to give the alternatives a clear price advantage everywhere. But politically this is a nightmare. Republicans hate taxes on principle. And Democrats resist a carbon tax because it is regressive. That is, poor people spend more of their income on power, so they would be unfairly burdened, despite the fact that they use the least fossil fuel.
Hillary Clinton intends to address it through regulations and subsidies, anathema to the right, which is a recipe for continued gridlock.
There is a way to drastically slow this lemming-like procession to the precipice — a policy that respects the priorities of the left and the right. Simply stated: Tax fossil fuels, but give the money back. George Shultz, an M.I.T. economist who served in the cabinets of both Nixon and Reagan, advocates this policy. “If you give the money back,” he has said, “it isn’t a tax. It is a fee.” Bill McKibben of 350.org and James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, also endorse this policy.
A bipartisan public interest group, Citizens Climate Lobby, proposes what it calls “fee and dividend.” It begins with a fee charged at the point where fossil fuel comes from the ground or crosses our border. The fee would be based on the amount of emissions the particular fuel emits when burned. The climate lobby proposes that the fee would be $15 per ton of emissions in the first year, but would escalate $10 per year each year after that. That’s only about 13 cents on a gallon of gas initially, less than we see in week-to-week fluctuations.
But the escalation clause would be a signal to businesses and individuals. It would avoid a sudden shock, but also give businesses and individuals time to react to predictably rising emission costs.
The money collected through this fee would be returned as a monthly dividend to every household in America in equal shares — one share to each adult; a half share to each child, up to two children.
A study from Regional Economic Models Inc. has demonstrated that this policy would have the following effects over 20 years:
The lowest two-thirds of households by income would get more back in dividend than their increase in cost of living. Everybody’s widowed Aunt Martha on a fixed income would be fine. And why not? Aunt Martha isn’t roaring around in a cigarette boat, so society should give her a bonus for being light on the environment. Until now, she’s been paying — through damage to her environment and impact on her health — for the profligacy of others. Aunt Martha, until now, has been an innocent victim.
Nearly three million net jobs would be created over 20 years, many of them green jobs in energy conservation and the transition to non-carbon fuels. Other jobs would be created because Aunt Martha would have a little more money to spend, maybe occasionally go out to dinner with her sister. That is job creation.
Gross domestic product would increase $1.7 trillion versus business as usual. Remember the Industrial Revolution? Good for the economy, right? It should not surprise us that the green revolution would have a similar effect.
Thirteen thousand American lives would be saved per year by breathing cleaner air, along with the savings in health care costs from a healthier populace.
The big payoff: There would be a 50-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions over this 20-year period.
Republicans might prefer that the money from such a fee go to reduce business taxes. Democrats might prefer that the money go to child care and education. Environmentalists might want the money to pay for energy research and subsidies of renewable energy. These are all worthy goals and will remain part of the national dialogue.
But this standoff in priorities is self-defeating for all sides. Corporations and children and the environment will suffer if we do not immediately address climate change in a comprehensive way. Democrats and Republicans have to recognize this threat, just as if it were an invading army. There is no economic reason not to do this. It is a jobs program, an economic stimulus, and a way to reduce health care costs.
There is no increase in government or new government regulations or the government choosing winners or unfair impact on the poor and middle class. But everybody, from Aunt Martha to General Motors, will have a financial incentive to use less fossil fuel and to create new ways to do that. The market will be the arbiter of which energy sources take the place of fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stays there for hundreds of years. Every day the hurdle gets higher and more expensive to surmount. Science is telling us that climate change is like a slow-moving river carrying us in darkness. The river is getting narrower and moving faster. At some as yet unknown point, it will enter a gorge with sheer cliff sides, heading for a waterfall with no escape.
As society invests in alternatives, we will also be paying the price for our past delay: storms and floods that destroy infrastructure, droughts that raise the price of food and destroy income, populations that must be relocated, and, yes, the lethal turmoil that moving and mingling population entails. If these processes are allowed to continue to sap our resources, the ice keeps melting, the forests keep burning, and the seas keep rising at the same time they are dying, we will find ourselves on a river of no escape.
Fee and dividend is a bipartisan way to jump-start the effort now to avoid that catastrophe.
Don Matheson, a member of Citizens Climate Lobby, lives in Springs.