Time For A Carbon Tax

A hefty carbon tax would tilt the economics in favor of conservation

By Mike Roselle

It is good to be back in Missoula. The Lowbagger Foundation fundraiser went well and we raised another five-hundred dollars bringing our total to well over one-thousand dollars so far this year. Someday, we hope to double that amount. Many thanks to the Dinosaur Café, the Kettle House Brewery and the Gourds for making it a special event and helping us reach our goal of becoming a major grassroots fundraising powerhouse. In next few weeks, we will be sending out our first checks to the starving, underpaid activists out there in Lowbaggerland. In the meantime, we have the rent covered.

I have been traveling a lot lately. Spending time with so many good people in the grassroots world has been a wonderful opportunity to learn new things and has had the effect of lifting my spirits and giving me hope for the future.

But then I went to Bozeman.

They ran out of beer at 10:30 during a brewery-sponsored Gourds show. These are the kind of things that happen in Bozeman. Next week I will be in Birmingham, Alabama to hook up with Floyd Satan and drive up to visit our friends in West Virginia who are fighting mountaintop removal, and check in on Boone, North Carolina and maybe even Ashville.

In my travels it has become clear that environmentalism is not dead but there is some truth in the belief that the large institutionalized environmental organizations are not up to the task of leading the charge on the most important issues. New organizations and new leaders are appearing all the time and the next few years should be transformational for our movement. The effects of global warming are causing waves of alarm throughout the world and across the social and political spectrum. What is missing is a clear, united front proposing a set of solutions that will get the job done, and this includes not just climate change but also stopping deforestation and the loss of biological diversity. On the grassroots level we seem to have a dedicated army of millions, yet in the halls of power we are voiceless and powerless. How can this be?

The easy response to this question would be to blame the ineptitude of the large bureaucratic, risk averse, compromising, sniveling, bloated lap-dog environmental groups that make up Big Green. But we would never do that.

No, we focus on the grassroots because it is there that we find hope, and it is there that people are fighting the good fight against the bad projects, like new logging roads, oil fields and coalmines.

Maybe this doesn’t sound like a good strategy, taking on a big energy company with a small budget and a tiny staff. It won’t make you popular in your hometown. But what choice do we have? These are the very projects that will exacerbate global warming and someone has to fight them.

Given the odds we are up against, we seem to succeed more often then we ought to, and have compiled an impressive set of victories over the last decade, too numerous to list here. But few conservation groups have the luxury to sit back and reflect on their record, as new battles are always being waged. With a small army of activists, funders and lawyers we are chipping away everywhere at the underpinnings of runaway industrial development. We are getting people to sit up and take notice of what is being lost. We are out in our communities recruiting new people face to face on at a time. We are in the business of abolishing despair, and cannot get involved in this hand wringing and public whining we hear from the leaders of the largest groups, who are genuinely afraid to lead.

Politicians, not visionaries, are now running the large environmental organizations, and today that means they are chiefly fundraisers. Like the politicians in both parties, they rely on consultants and pollsters to make sure the money keeps coming in and that they keep their jobs. Not one of these big groups is strongly associated with fighting global warming in the mind of the public. If you are a concerned citizen, you are asked to drive a dam Prius to work and send in your hundred dollars. We should be asking people to grab their pitchforks and storm the castle.

If incendiary speech is yelling, “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, what is it called when you don’t yell, “FIRE!” in a burning theater.

What is it called when you stand up and say instead, “We are working with the film industry to improve fire safety in buildings like these, please give us money and enjoy the movie?”

I believe that those who decry the death of the environmental movement are underestimating the amount of rage and concern there is throughout the land over climate change, and the frustration over the refusal of either political party to seriously address it. The big environmental groups have an opportunity here and they won’t seize the moment, just as Al Gore and John Kerry were afraid to address the issue of global warming during the last two presidential elections.

Someone needs to take the bully pulpit and get behind a comprehensive plan to cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions and halt deforestation. One thing both supporters of the free market and liberals would support is a carbon tax and an energy tax if that money went for efficiency, conservation and truly clean energy. It would provide money to buy up SUVs and crush them. It would provide money for mass transportation. A serious carbon tax would not solve the problem alone, but it would be an important first step in actually reducing fossil fuel usage in the developed world. It would also provide funding for conservation of tropical forests in Africa, the Amazon other biological hot spots where species are going extinct every day.

A carbon tax would be a great symbolic victory over Big Oil and Big Coal, and would prove that they are not invincible. We would still have to continue chipping away at any new efforts to expand the infrastructure of oil dependency, and demand cleaner sources of energy. We would still need to denounce false solutions like ethanol and “clean coal”, nuclear power. We would still need to question the wisdom of putting an industrial scale wind farm on every ridge top and in every bay and meadow. But a hefty carbon tax would tilt the economics in favor of conservation, efficiency and clean energy across the board.

I can discern no significant debate on this issue by the major environmental groups. Go to their websites and you will get advice on how to drive, told to wear a sweater or write your congress member to raise fuel-efficiency standards for cars. It looks like business as usual for Big Green, only some who have “Global Warming Projects”. It looks like these groups have their head in the sand, or maybe in another sunless location.

In the grassroots conservation movement, the strategy for today is simple, keep chipping away at the bad projects, keep building public support, and most of all keep trying to fend off the hopelessness and despair that sometimes accompanies learning that the end of life on Earth as we know it is happening.

A united national campaign for a hefty carbon tax is just the kind of campaign that could light a fire under everyone who is still wondering what to do when they hear about the polar ice caps melting and the glaciers receding. The greatest risk now is that we go into a major election cycle and no one will be bold enough to propose a real solution. Judging from the last two decades, two decades where we were all aware of the coming climate crisis, two decades where we did nothing to address the problem, the leadership of the big environmental organizations are planning to do just that again.

We should not let that happen.

A grassroots campaign for a carbon tax would force politicians from both parties, as well as Big Green to take a position.

Are you going to do something about global warming or aren’t you?