Isra-Mart srl : Carbon Fee and Dividend: to Spur Job Creation, Industrial Boom

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The conventional wisdom on carbon emissions is that we must emit ever more carbon dioxide, if we are to continue to be prosperous. This is a blatant falsehood rooted in 18th-century thinking about the nature of energy. The conventional wisdom on action to reduce carbon emissions is that it must be expensive, harmful to the economy, and result in less productive power generation. This is a blatant falsehood based on the outmoded idea that combustion is the most favorable way to harvest energy.

All systems of carbon taxation or carbon emissions capping operate on the principle that applying economic pressure in a targeted way can inspire markets to change their behavior. This is the very logic of market-based economic systems. Instead of an authoritarian system of planned economics, consumers, elected governments and market players, compete to influence the direction of economic activity over the short-, medium- and long-term cycles.

But there is one way of steering outmoded, combustion-burdened economic systems toward a healthier state-of-the-art 21st-century energy economy, that will not entail rapidly escalating price burdens on a consumer market economy. With a carbon fee and dividend approach, we can make sure that only those interests that refuse to innovate and to improve their standards of operation for power generation pay for falling behind.

The logic of a carbon fee and dividend model is that it rescues ordinary consumers, and our wider civilization —which is dependent on a relatively stable global climate system— from the unwise, backward-thinking model of the least cooperative profit-making businesses. A fee is applied at the source of any carbon-based combustible fuel, per ton of CO2 emissions potential from that fuel, and 100% of the revenues are returned to households, to cope with the penalty the affected industries will attempt to pass on to consumers.

Most households will see no net rise in their energy costs, and the monthly dividend check they receive will effectively insulate them against price hikes. Because the fee steadily increases over time, consumers will soon see a marked economic benefit in buying cheaper non-carbon-emitting renewable fuels, and industry and investors will follow with their money and infrastructure.

The fee and dividend approach will spur major new investments in carbon-free renewable energy sources and the development of a smart energy infrastructure designed to optimize the output and efficiency of an electric vehicle transport economy based on clean energy resources. Entrepreneurs and investors will come flying off the sidelines to support the most significant public-private investment in infrastructure in more than half a century.

The resulting job creation will spur an economic boom that will not only help the nation restore the balance of capital and strengthen the middle class, but also push more wealth through the consumer economy, benefitting those firms that are positioned to take advantage of an industrial, transport, energy and consumer boom economy.

And, the US economy will be able to liberate itself from the volatile speculation of fossil fuels markets and a perilous dependency on the whims of hostile foreign oil-producing states. Because of its geographical diversity, industrial capacity and dynamic consumer economy, the United States is better positioned than any other nation on Earth to take advantage of the clean energy transition, to be a genuine world leader in the economic standard for resilience and growth in the 21st century.

Just three states (Texas, Kansas and North Dakota) have enough wind energy potential to power the entire domestic US economy (transport, consumer and industrial), if the infrastructure is built. Other Great Plains states (Oklahoma, South Dakota, Nebraska) have an unprecedented opportunity to both complement that power generation potential and to build industrial capacity to supply the power generation infrastructure of the region.

Industrial powerhouses, like mining giant Rio Tinto, automotive manufacturer GM, power grid operators and electricity suppliers, are positioned to see windfall gains coming in, if they are able to build or supply the new market infrastructure. Disused and exhausted mines are already being converted to wind and solar, and in places like Coal River Mountain, West Virginia, evidence already points to the more lucrative potential of clean energy resources.

In mountain states, throughout Appalachia, there is potential for something never before achieved: for the rapid acceleration of building new economic infrastructure, including opportunities for better-paid work, more prosperous communities and long-term economic resiliency. Local leaders in business and industry can benefit from benefitting their communities, sharing in the shift in economic priorities, and securing more reliable revenue streams than those available from geologically intermittent, often hard-to-reach veins and reservoirs of carbon-based minerals.

In each of these new hotspots, there is a double potential for investment/output gain: first by building and managing the clean energy infrastructure, second by achieving the export capacity needed to deliver power through the smart grid to major urban centers of energy consumption.

The chief myth regarding the transition to a clean energy economy is that renewable energy is too intermittent to be viable and that urban centers demand too much energy for clean renewables to meet demand. That myth can be described as the baseload-impossible myth. Baseload power is the resource or resources that are considered the stable foundation for a power supply grid.

In fact, the Department of Energy and Department of Defense have both begun transitioning to a model wherein future planning relies on the breakthroughs that have shown clean renewables can be more reliable and more affordable than high energy-content fossil fuels. The Secretary of Energy has said the entire idea of baseload power sources is outdated, as smart-grid technology means any abundant resource can achieve reliable universal power supply.

A report by the American Solar Energy Society and Management Information Systems found that the direct job creation potential of wind and solar is 4.6 and 5.4 jobs per million dollars of output, respectively, while oil and natural gas produce just 0.8 jobs per one million dollars in output, and coal just 1.9.

A joint report from the Center for American Progress and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, on the benefits of clean energy shows that the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors together could account for 37 million jobs by 2030. Compare that to the 9 million the oil and natural gas industries say they now support directly and indirectly.

Conventional wisdom about the inviability of a carbon-fee-induced transition to this new, more vibrant, economic landscape, is rooted in the perception that unless every major corporation is able to keep its own costs at a minimum, the middle class consumer economy will fail. The job creation boom is the evidence that such analysis is flawed and disingenuous: it is the major market players that will benefit if they adjust to an environment in which a wealthier, more resilient middle class is able to fund and benefit from the green economy boom.

The carbon fee and dividend proposal will give very real, very significant, investment opportunity to communities, states, major industrial players and small start-ups, and it will build a new era of prosperity into the American economy by building the middle class and infusing the consumer economy with a viable long-term domestic energy-production model more efficient and scalable than any other yet conceived.