Carbon Tax Bill

The Dingell Life
Michigan Rep. John Dingell drafts a carbon-tax bill

Michigan Rep. John Dingell (D) has drafted a carbon-tax bill and posted a summary to his website to solicit public feedback. In its current form, Dingell's legislation would phase in over five years a $50-per-ton tax on carbon and a tax of 50 cents per gallon on gasoline and jet fuel (after five years the tax would be indexed to inflation). The bill would also phase out tax deductions for homes over 3,000 square feet. A carbon tax is beloved by economists and other wonks as the most transparent, efficient means of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Voters, however, tend to hate the idea, and thus most politicians do as well. The 81-year-old Dingell, who has served in Congress for 52 years and chairs the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has been accused of pushing "political poison" in order to torpedo other climate bills that include boosts in CAFE standards. He denies it, but then again, he says this: "I'm trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it's going to have a measure of pain that you're not going to like." The man sure knows how to excite voters!

Also
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/12/20/dingell/

The formidable Democrat from Michigan, now 80, has served 51 years in the House of Representatives -- the second-longest of any congressional career in history. During that time, he played a key role in pushing through many of America's cornerstone environmental laws, including the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the original Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system that has defined America's automotive energy-efficiency strategy since 1975. "I've been a busy little boy," Dingell says in describing his own environmental record.

But despite these achievements, environmentalists are not uniformly overjoyed that Dingell will soon take the helm of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees most energy-related bills. As they see it, his record has a sizeable hitch: as representative for a district that includes suburban Detroit, Dingell is a dogged defender of the U.S. auto industry. Though he helped author CAFE rules 30 years ago, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo, he has since staunchly opposed ratcheting up fuel-economy standards, on the grounds that it could imperil the American economy.

That's why some environmentalists see Dingell as the single biggest roadblock on the path toward meaningful climate policy in the 110th Congress, while others are busy crafting Detroit-friendly climate plans that they hope will win Dingell's support.

Dingell spoke with Grist from his office in Washington, D.C., giving insight into what the climate-policy landscape may -- or may not -- look like over the next two years.

(Opening questions only, not the entire interview)

What major environmental breakthroughs do you see on the horizon for the 110th Congress, in an ideal world?

Oh, you're a smart girl, because that's a nasty question. You know, this is going to be very difficult. There's still harvesting of the ill will that's been sown over the last dozen years. We've got a Republican president, and we've got to bring the Republicans in and establish some cooperation, of which there's been relatively little of late. I'd rather tell you on what we're going to work than tell you what we're going to do, because I don't like to look foolish by having promised something that I don't deliver.

What are your environmental priorities for the 110th Congress, particularly for the Energy and Commerce Committee?

We'll have to see first what is ready, what is ripe, and what is doable. We've got a bunch of things. Proper funding for brownfields and for Superfund, administration of the Clean Air Act and other acts under the jurisdiction of the EPA. We're going to take a look at global warming and see what has to be done there.

Barbara Boxer [incoming chair of the Senate Environment Committee] has said repeatedly that she sees global warming as the single biggest environmental threat on the horizon. Do you agree with her?

I don't agree and I don't disagree. I don't know what the biggest one is. Certainly if there is environmental warming, it is a very major environmental problem and it should be addressed.

So you don't believe the scientific consensus on global warming is established at this point?

This country, this world, the [human] race of which you and I are a part, is great at having consensuses that are in great error. And so I want to get the scientific facts, and find out what the situation is, and find out what is the cure, and find out what is the cure that is acceptable to the country that I represent and serve.

You mentioned in our last conversation that you want to call for climate hearings. Is your hope to get a clearer idea of the science and the potential solutions?

Yes, yes. We need to hold hearings to gather the facts on questions of both science and policy solutions. Let's talk global warming. If you remember, Kyoto was, in an anticipatory fashion, rejected 95 to nothing in the U.S. Senate, on the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which said that the Senate would not ratify any agreement which imposed burdens on the United States which were disproportionate to the burdens that everybody else was going to get. And so Kyoto never got ratified by the Senate. That's a serious matter. So if we're going to deal with this problem, you have to recognize we're not the only people that burn coal, emit carbon dioxide or pollutants of any kind. New Zealand, which has relatively little industry, is an enormous emitter of CO2. They've got a bunch of sheep over there that do it.

The methane.

The methane. So, we are not alone in this problem, and we should not be alone in the solution.

Would it not be wise to introduce domestic solutions in the meantime, even if we don't yet have an international agreement?

Is that going to solve the problem? China has an exemption from the Kyoto agreement because it's classified as a developing country. The Indians are, too. In a meeting about the Kyoto agreement, I asked the Chinese, "How long are you going to be a developing country, before we can expect you to participate in cleaning up?" They looked me in the eye and said, "Dingell, we're always going to be developing. We aren't ever going to be a stable, staid, complete society. So we're never going to be covered by it. We're just going to go ahead and burn all the damn coal, emit all the carbon dioxide that we want to emit." And they will very shortly be the biggest emitter in the world. Far bigger than we.

Now you ask, if we were to terminate all of the burning of coal and all of the production of CO2 in this country, and China and India and Europe and everybody else in the developing world keeps going, I don't think you're going to be looking for much in the way of a resolution. This is an international problem.

So you believe the emphasis needs to be on how we're going to rally the world to address climate change, not how we're going to rally ourselves to address it?

Well, we have to do all of the above. We've got to begin to find out what we can do, and how we can do it without destituting the American society. But by the same token, we're going to have to help others to do the same thing and persuade them to be participants in that undertaking. In terms of diplomacy, that's probably one of the single biggest problems this country's got.

But you've got a lot of [Americans] saying, "We're going to solve the problem. We're going to make these cars." Well, we could all be riding around in kiddie cars and we wouldn't solve the problem. And we'd have an awful lot of angry Americans. You're not going to solve [the climate] problem yourself any more than you're going to solve Iraq by yourself.

What's a kiddie car?

Don't you know what a kiddie car is?

No.

It's one of those three-wheel things that kids get when they start out, they sit on and it's got a little handlebar, and they sort of pad around on this little three-wheeled tricycle.

Got it. What type of climate legislation should we be talking about domestically?

If I knew that, I'd be glad to tell you, but I don't. We're going to try to find out what we need to do and proceed in a responsible fashion.

You were one of the authors of legislation establishing CAFE standards in the 1970s, but you've since opposed raising the standards. Do you still oppose raising them?

The law says that the government has the authority to fix fuel efficiency at the maximum technologically feasible [miles-per-gallon] number. It has raised this a little bit, but it's not been able to make any radical changes from the numbers we wrote back in the 1970s. I will probably be asking if there is greater efficiency that can be achieved, and if so, how. We'll also ask how this can all be done without destituting American industry.