What will you sacrifice for ‘climate’?

Ours is a populist age, dominated not only by the anti-elitist posturing of Donald Trump and the Republican Party but also by a resurgent left that views “billionaire” as a dirty word. Many of our most profound problems, however, originate not in the pathologies of a narrow ruling class but among the broad mass of humanity.
A powerful reminder came in the form of last week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study contains the now-customary warnings of grievous future harms from climate change, plus a new section detailing the stark reality that it is now too late to avert significant warming.
For decades, pointy-headed elites have called on the nations of the world to address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by putting a meaningful price on carbon. For the most part, it hasn’t happened — not because of the perfidy of the fossil-fuel industry, but because the idea of a carbon tax is toxically unpopular.
Yes, some polls show public support for a carbon tax. But in the real world, carbon taxation lost badly in two separate ballot initiatives in Washington State in 2016 and 2018. If a carbon tax can’t win in a state President Joe Biden carried by almost 20 points last year, and which has no local fossil-fuel industry, where can it win? And as this study of the Washington experience shows, it was only over the course of the actual campaign that public support for carbon taxation collapsed.
Democrats have looked at rigorous issue polling that presents pro and con arguments on both sides of various topics, I’m told. In that context, emission taxes poll worse than defunding the police. That’s why carbon taxes are nowhere to be found among Biden’s various ambitious proposals. Instead, they try to address climate change through measures that don’t appear to require any direct sacrifices by the broad public.
Taxing carbon dioxide emissions is so unpopular that a recent activist sting revealed that supporting a carbon tax was actually part of ExxonMobil’s plan to prevent serious government action against climate change. “Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans,” an oil lobbyist was recorded as saying. So it was safe for ExxonMobil to support it.
That a major fossil-fuel producer could suggest taxing fossil fuels as part of a bank-shot effort to help the fossil-fuel industry is one of the great ironies of our time. But in a narrow sense it’s logical: The hypothetical tax could be wielded as a sword and a shield against other regulatory and subsidy efforts without there ever being a serious risk of it happening.
This, in turn, is why climate activists have basically moved on from pricing. Instead they have put their faith in the kind of subsidy efforts that exist in small ways in the bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate approved last week and in the larger, more partisan budget proposal Congress will debate this month and next.

—Bloomberg