WASHINGTON – In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a memo describing a startling future. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal, wrote Mr. Moynihan, would dangerously heat the planet, melt the glaciers and cause the seas to rise. “Goodbye New York,” wrote Mr. Moynihan. “Goodbye Washington, for that.”
Fifty-three years later, Congress is about to finally respond to what Mr. Moynihan called it “the carbon dioxide problem.”
On Sunday, Senate Democrats prepared a $370 billion bill designed to shift the country away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other renewable energy. If the House passes the legislation later this week, as expected, it will be the nation’s first major climate law, as scientists warn that nations have only a few years left to make deep enough cuts in carbon dioxide to avoid a planetary catastrophe.
Once enacted, the new law is expected to help reduce the country’s greenhouse gas pollution by roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. That’s not enough to stave off the worst impacts of a warming planet, but it would be a significant down payment and the biggest climate action the United States has ever taken.
“Finally, we’ve now crossed an important threshold,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who as a lawmaker held the first congressional hearings on the issue in 1982 and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with climate scientists for their joint efforts to spread awareness. about climate change. “I never imagined for a moment that it would take this long.”
In interviews, Mr. Gore and other veterans of the nation’s failed attempts at climate legislation pointed to several reasons why a climate bill is on the verge of finally becoming law: Senate passage by a razor-thin majority of 51 to 50, with the tie. Vice President Kamala Harris’ breakout vote.
All said the incontrovertible evidence that climate change has already arrived, in the form of terribly extreme wildfires, drought, storms and floods affecting every corner of the United States, has helped build political support. Increasingly, the sheer volume of real-time data has overwhelmed the well-funded, decades-long strategy of oil, gas and coal companies to sow doubt about the severity of climate change.
But they also signaled a shift in strategy, which ditches what experts consider the most efficient way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a pollution tax, for the less effective but more politically acceptable approach of monetary incentives to industries and consumers to switch. to clean energy. Essentially, lawmakers replaced sticks with carrots.
William Nordhaus, who first conceived of the carbon tax as a young economist at Yale University in the 1970s, wrote in an email: “Carbon taxes have proven a toxic mix with politics, although the toxicity varies from country to country. Subsidies, on the other hand, are catnip for the elite.”
Biden has pledged that the United States will stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. All major economies must do the same to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above from pre-industrial levels, scientists say. This is the threshold beyond which the probability of catastrophic droughts, floods, wildfires and heat waves increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Without putting a price on carbon pollution, it will be difficult for the United States to reach its net zero goal by 2050, experts say.
What’s in the Democrats’ climate and tax bill
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Automobile industry. Taxpayers can currently get up to $7,500 in tax credits to buy an electric vehicle, but there is a limit to how many cars from each manufacturer are eligible. The new bill would eliminate that cap and extend the tax deduction through 2032; used cars would also qualify for a credit of up to $4,000.
Energy industry The bill would provide billions of dollars in rebates for Americans who buy electric and energy-efficient appliances, as well as tax breaks for companies that build new, zero-emission electricity sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels. The package also sets aside $60 billion to encourage clean energy manufacturing in the United States. The bill also requires companies to pay a financial penalty per metric ton for methane emissions that exceed federal limits starting in 2024.
Low-income communities. The bill would invest more than $60 billion to support low-income communities and communities of color that are disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. This includes grants for technology and zero-emission vehicles, as well as money to mitigate the negative effects of roads, bus depots and other transport facilities.
Fossil fuel industry. The bill would require the federal government to auction off more public land and water for oil drilling and expand tax credits for coal and gas-burning plants that rely on carbon capture technology. Those provisions are among those added to win the support of Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-West Virginia.
West Virginia. The bill would also bring major benefits to the state of Mr. Manchin, the nation’s second largest coal producer, making permanent a federal trust fund to support miners with black lung disease and offering new incentives for companies to build wind and solar farms in areas where coal mines or coal plants have recently closed
“A carbon tax has been the dream of people who want to be good stewards of the planet for decades,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian. “But instead, the reality of American politics is that you give a chunk of cash to stimulate new technology. It’s not going to be enough to get to the 2050 goal. But it’s still the biggest thing than the United States has ever done on climate change.”
false starts
A few years after the note of Mr. Moynihan in the Nixon White House, Mr. Nordhaus proposed an elegant solution: governments should put a tax, fee or some other price on carbon pollution.
By 1988, climate change had begun to grab the headlines. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Senate committee that man-made global warming has already begun. The following year, Dr. Hansen testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Mr. Gore, who sensed that momentum was building to pass legislation to prevent the planet from warming further.
As vice president in 1993, Mr. Gore helped promote a measure that would accomplish the same thing as a carbon tax.
But after the bill passed the House, Republicans attacked it as an “energy tax” and the Senate never took it up. The following year, Republicans promised to cut taxes and reform government and won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952.
“It was kind of crazy, because Clinton and Gore got the House to vote for it even though it was suicide,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a member of the Senate at the time and later worked in the administration Clinton. “This set back climate policy for more than a decade. It was politically devastating.”
Climate policy lay dormant in Washington until 2009, when President Barack Obama tried again with a “cap and trade” bill. While not a direct carbon tax, it would have put a small cap on the amount of carbon dioxide pollution that could be emitted each year and forced industries to pay permits to pollute.
History repeated itself. The measure passed the House, but within days Republicans called it an “energy tax.” Although Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the Senate never took up the bill, unable to muster enough votes in its own party to pass it in the face of Republican opposition.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, recalled Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, then the majority leader, and told him in July 2010 that there would be no further efforts to move climate legislation.
Democrats had fought hard to enact the Affordable Care Act “and they didn’t want any more conflict,” Mr. Whitehouse that Mr. Reid told him.
The aftermath “was a long, sad period,” Mr. Whitehouse. In 2012, he began making almost weekly speeches from the Senate, continuing to this day, warning about the dangers of global warming.
“I just decided, look, we’re not going to stop talking about climate change on this site,” he said.
In Obama’s second term, after Democrats had lost control of the House, the president enacted a series of regulations to reduce carbon dioxide pollution from cars and power plants.
Many Republicans still expressed doubts that human activity was causing climate change, or even that the planet was warming. In February 2015, Senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, held up a fat snowball on the Senate floor as proof that global warming was a hoax.
Obama’s successor, President Donald J. Trump, reversed and weakened the emissions standards, demonstrating the fragility of executive action.
Policy change and another chance
As efforts on Capitol Hill to address the climate crisis stalled and stalled, policy was beginning to shift, activists and lawmakers say.
Evidence of climate change became increasingly visible in congressional districts, with powerful storms causing death and destruction, a mega-drought threatening water supplies and dangerous heat waves taxing power grids.
A major 2017 scientific report, the National Climate Assessment, detailed the economic cost of climate change, from record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest, and infrastructure destruction in the South. Over the past five years, the United States has experienced 89 weather and climate disasters with damages of more than $1 billion each, costing the nation a total of $788 billion and 4,557 lives, according to the National Oceanic. .