Recently, a group of senators, including Republican Bill Cassidy (La.), released a terrible legislative proposal calling for the U.S. to impose a carbon tax on imports (which would invite other countries to impose a carbon tariff on the U.S. in turn). It’s just one more example of growing — and misguided — enthusiasm among some U.S. policy-makers for some form of carbon taxation.
While the recent proposal is also being sponsored by Senator Lindsay Graham (R., S.C.) and would create a special “carbon pricing board” of bureaucrats to tax every product imported into the U.S., carbon taxes are usually a left-wing goal. Given the countless activities that produce carbon dioxide as a by-product (not to mention breathing), conservative parties around the world are increasingly realizing that opposing carbon taxation in all its forms is a political winner.
Canada’s Conservative Party, for example, has embraced the carbon-tax fight. It’s clear that opposing such taxation is both a politically popular and smart policy and could lead to electoral victory as well as the end to higher energy costs dragging down the nation’s economy. “The carbon tax is killing us,” Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party who is currently running against Justin Trudeau in that country’s long-delayed elections, posted on the website formerly known as Twitter. “Trudeau paused the carbon tax for some people’s heat, but wants to quadruple it on everyone else. Take the tax off, keep the heat on, for ALL Canadians.”
Canada’s elections must legally take place by 2025 but could occur sooner. Polls show if an election were held today, Poilievre’s conservatives would obtain 41 percent of the vote, clobbering Trudeau’s Liberal Party’s 26 percent. And a big part of that is that just 15 percent of Canadians support Trudeau’s carbon-taxation plan, with a clear plurality of 42 percent calling for the entire tax to be scrapped. Clearly Senator Graham should learn something from our neighbors to the north.
The politics of a carbon tax aren’t just this way in Canada. There’s a reason that Australia, one of the largest Western economies to adopt a pure carbon tax, abolished it in 2014 after the prime minister campaigned on a “pledge in blood” to “axe the tax.”
Campaigns to end carbon taxes are politically successful because such campaigns champion the interests of the vast majority over the preferences of a small elite. Wealthy carbon-tax preachers such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio live personal lives of luxury, flying on private jets while demanding carbon austerity for the masses, making driving and heating one’s home more expensive.
From a policy perspective, carbon taxes are all pain with no gain. They devastate the economy, disproportionately harm the poor, and do nothing to reduce temperatures. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a carbon tax would double the tax burden of the poorest households. And although calculating the true costs is difficult, as the money is spread out among numerous grants, subsidies, taxes, “green” regulations, and salaries for bureaucrats, it’s clear that the poor wouldn’t be the only ones footing the bill. Combined with current energy-efficiency and emissions-reduction goals, carbon taxation would cost an estimated $16.5 trillion by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. And for all that, carbon taxation would have a literally undetectable effect on global warming.
Even usual bastions of environmentalism such as France dropped plans for carbon taxation due to its unpopularity and “concerns about employment, legal difficulties and security of supply,” according to Reuters. Polls regularly show that 80 percent of French voters opposed a planned carbon tax.
Only six nations — Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Uruguay, Chile, and Finland — actually have pure carbon taxation today, and no country actually taxes carbon-dioxide emissions at the levels deemed necessary to substantially mitigate global warming, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Other countries, such as Japan, are either gradually implementing a carbon-pricing scheme similar to a carbon tax, or are covered by the complex European system of emissions trading, which are similar in effect.
Thirteen deep-blue U.S. states — California, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont — have some form of carbon-pricing, credit, or tax in place. That’s mostly via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), but participation in it is collapsing. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s Air Pollution Control Board removed the state from RGGI in June, noting that it was “in effect a direct tax on all households and businesses.” Pennsylvania’s participation in RGGI was blocked by the Commonwealth Court last November. The court ruled that the state’s left-leaning bureaucracy and then-governor Tom Wolf (D.) had greatly overstepped their authority to illegally join the measure without the consent of voters.
“Stated simply, to pass constitutional muster, the Commonwealth’s participation in RGGI may only be achieved through legislation duly enacted by the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and not merely through the Rulemaking promulgated by DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] and EQB [Environmental Quality Board]”, the 18-page ruling reads.
Carbon pricing and taxes are deeply unpopular even in the remaining deep-blue states that have them. When proposed as ballot measures, they fail by large margins, even in the best possible scenarios for passage. In 2016, Washingtonians defeated a carbon-tax ballot measure by almost 19 points. This was despite carbon-tax supporters’ outspending their opponents by three to one with significant support from high-profile environmental activists, including DiCaprio. Environmentalists tried again with even more favorable conditions in the 2018 election, which favored Democrats. But this time, the referendum on a fairly small carbon tax ($15 per metric ton, or roughly one-eleventh the rate of Canada’s new national carbon taxes), was crushed by more than 13 points. Proponents again outspent the opposition (by roughly two to one).
Despite such repeated rejection at the ballot box, Washington State Democrats forced through a carbon-pricing measure in 2021 over the unanimous objection of the state’s Republicans. A ballot measure to repeal it will likely appear before voters in 2024.
By tying themselves so closely to these deeply unpopular policies, left-wing environmentalists have made a potentially major electoral mistake. All that’s left is for American conservatives to draw attention to the error. They’re better off doing that than adopting a version of it themselves.
Source: National Review
