"The ultimate challenge"

I have been a fan of carbon tax.  I have blogged about it, talked about it, discussed it with students.  And I followed with interest the ballot initiative in the neighboring state.

It is, therefore, depressing to agree with David Leonhardt about the political reality of pricing carbon--won't happen.

What is the political reality?  As I quoted in that blog-post, "any Republican Presidential candidate who supported a carbon tax or regulations “would be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process.”  This Republican reality has become a nightmare in this hyper-partisan tRump time:

The G.O.P.’s radical turn means that climate activists can no longer search for a compromise between the two parties, in the hope that their leaders will try to sell it to skeptical voters. Republicans have made clear that they will instead stoke the skepticism for their own ends. Doing so pleases the oil and coal industries, which are generous campaign donors. It also helps win elections.

Win elections.  Win them at any cost.  Screw the damn liberals!

Why then don't initiatives succeed, even in blue states like Washington?

Carbon pricing puts attention on the mechanism, be it a dreaded tax or a byzantine cap-and-trade system. Mechanisms don’t inspire people. Mechanisms are easy to caricature as big-government bureaucracy. Think about the debate over Obamacare: When the focus was on mechanisms — insurance mandates, insurance exchanges and the like — the law was not popular. When the focus shifted to basic principles — Do sick people deserve health insurance? — the law became much more so.

Which is how tRump also won, right?  While Hillary Clinton talked like an expert on the mechanisms to make things better for Americans, tRump merely provided flashy simplistic slogans and rhetoric.  She, for instance, talked to coal miners, about how she will support programs to re-train them, while he even mimed a cartoonish version of coal-digging.  And he won!

This reality is also driving a new way of looking at the climate change issues--the Green New Deal:

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar, works for the think tank New Consensus and helped design the Green New Deal. When I spoke with her, I was struck by her sense of political realism and how different it was from the old definition. For a long time, environmental activists have shown an almost compulsive — and in many ways admirable — honesty. They have chosen policies, like carbon taxes, that emphasize the downsides: Energy prices will rise. The Green New Deal and the recent clean-energy ballot initiatives do the reverse. They emphasize the benefits of clean energy and minimize the downsides. “There is a lot of anxiety and uncertainty in America today,” Gunn-Wright said. “Any solution that is tied to tangible economic benefits is going to have a better chance of passing.”

The truth, but not the whole truth.  Which is any day infinitely better than tRump's and the GOP's bullshit.

Leonhardt sums it up well:

The sad truth is that climate politics are probably not going remain as they are today. The future will almost certainly bring increasing harm, through more extreme weather. Eventually, some Republican politicians, especially in coastal states, may be willing to break with party leaders on the issue. Eventually, Americans may decide to punish politicians who deny or play down climate change. By the time a price on carbon took effect, it might not be so unpopular anymore. But we can’t wait for the politics to change to begin taking action.