by Charles Komanoff
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Memo to North Dakota
To unlock wind power, put a price on carbon 7
Posted 2 weeks ago Why does wind power account for just 2% of North Dakota's electricity generation - barely matching wind's national share? One obvious reason is lack of transmission capability to reach load centers. But another is the extraordinary cheapness of coal. Read More -
Wanted: Cloudsplitter
Waxman-Markey: ‘80% less by 2050’ is too hard, let’s do 46% 3
Posted 6 months ago The "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" seems intent on postponing Americans' day of reckoning with climate-damaging fossil fuels. Read More -
Stand By Me
BC voters back carbon tax 1
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago Carbon emissions met its first big electoral test this week, as British Columbia voters rewarded BC premier Gordon Campbell, who last July instituted North America's first major carbon tax, with a third four-year term. Read More -
Give Fees A Chance
Pollution taxes work 1
Posted 6 months, 4 weeks ago Pollution taxes have seldom been tried. But in the few cases where they've been tried, they've worked rather well. Read More -
Unchain Chu
Energy boss Steven Chu misses his bike 12
Posted 7 months ago Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an avid bicyclist, is now being driven to work by a security detail -- and it doesn't make him happy. Read More -
Anti-wind now not just for NIMBY’s 8
Posted 7 months ago Opposition to wind power used to be the province of NIMBY's who quailed at the supposed intrusion into their viewsheds and soundsheds. No more. Wind power is big — its share of U.S. electricity reached 1.3% last year — and getting bigger fast enough to alarm the Far Right and other feeders at the trough of coal and nuclear.The latest poke at wind was posted yesterday on the American Spectator blog, and it's a doozy:
[W]ind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.
Translated: wind… Read More
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The freedom fee
The Kheel-Komanoff Plan: A congestion toll to liberate New York 6
Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago Back in 1993, I took a scalpel to the "AUTO-FREE NEW YORK" sticker on my bike, excising the first "R" so that "AUTO-FREE" became "AUTO-FEE." After years of battling motor vehicles, first as an urban cyclist and later as president of the bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, I became convinced that it made more sense to charge for cars' use of roads than to try to eliminate them. "Don't ban cars, bill them!" Discourage vehicle use by internalizing the harms from driving in the price to drive, and invest the revenues in mass transit and other alternatives.Since then, cities… Read More
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Policy at Bernie's
Will carbon cap-and-trade be the next Ponzi scheme? 21
Posted 10 months, 4 weeks ago Even as the tsunami of Bernard Madoff's busted Ponzi scheme was submerging hapless rentiers around the world, another esoteric financial enterprise quietly took a step forward this week. At a couple of hundred million bucks, this new venture is just spare change alongside Bernie's 50 billion. But in time it could grow to rival Madoff's swindle in scope, and in the process thwart our planet's last shot to head off climate catastrophe.The new venture is a national carbon cap-and-trade system, and for its Phase I the traders have crafted a ten-state Northeast compact dubbed the Regional Greenhouse Gas… Read More
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Can the promise of a new political landscape include a U.S. carbon tax?
Advocates launch the Price Carbon Campaign 2
Posted 1 year ago What do the defeat of the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill, the burst of the oil-price bubble, the Wall Street meltdown, the promise of a new political landscape in the wake of the fall elections, and the exigencies of the climate crisis have in common?To the Carbon Tax Center and CTC's partners at the Climate Crisis Coalition, these events together augur for a resurgence of interest in, and potential political support for, the "gold standard" for carbon pricing: a national, revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Consider: Read More
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We must tax carbon
Hansen’s message to the planet 17
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago Maybe it was the thought of two decades of climate-crisis exhortation, little more heeded than words shouted at a hurricane.Maybe it was the temporizing of the Democrats and the obstructionism of the GOP. Or it might have been the images of cities, houses and farmland of his native Iowa drowned by the latest "500-year" floods.
Photo: germuska via Flickr.Perhaps it was all three. Whatever the reasons, the climate crisis' Paul Revere turned it up a few more notches in a speech yesterday (PDF) at a Congressional staff briefing… Read More
