The greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already causing serious problems like storms, droughts, and flooding. If they keep increasing for several more decades, they are predicted to reach a “tipping point” which will make present human society unsustainable.
CO2, carbon dioxide, is hardly the only greenhouse gas, but it is the key one. Human activity increases the CO2 in the atmosphere principally in two ways, deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. While they have similar results, they are different sorts of activity, and it would be sensible to regulate them separately.
We must regulate both. Stopping one source of greenhouse-gas pollution and not the other will only slightly delay the collapse of civilization.
In the global effort to avoid the catastrophe, the US is AOL in two different ways.
1) One of our major political parties hides its head in the sand. Currently this party has enough control to have withdrawn our country from the Paris Accords.
2) Among large countries the US has the highest per capita carbon footprint.
I suggest that, upon the Democrats achieving sufficient legislative power, we take dramatic independent action on the fossil-fuel side of abatement. We
1) establish how much fossil carbon we bring to the surface of the USA in a year, by mining, pumping, or importation,
2) sell permits to do that extraction and importation, and
3) reduce the permits available by 5% a year for the next ten years.
That would reduce the portion of our carbon footprint due to fossil fuels by 50% by 2032 or 2033. (The program would require some time to be enacted and more time to evaluate the starting figure.)
Coal would count nearly a ton of carbon for a ton of coal; petroleum would count rather less, how much less depending on the type of petroleum. We would have to count iron and steel in the imports as the amount of carbon needed to produce the raw metal. Otherwise, we would merely be exporting the carbon footprint.
As this would be revenue-positive, this would not compete with any other program (except for public and legislative attention). It avoids the sort of criticism that, for example, the gasohol program has received, that when every source is counted, it doesn’t reduce the footprint. Also, it allows for reducing energy usage. That cuts the carbon footprint, but it tends to escape the attention of proposals. By limiting the availability of fossil fuel, this raises the cost of the carbon footprint directly rather than subsidize the alternatives some authority thinks will reduce it.
Indeed, the difference between this proposal and a carbon tax is that the carbon tax raises the cost of burning carbon by a predictable amount, and the reduction in usage which will result is sheer guesswork; this proposal reduces the fossil-fuel usage by predictable amounts each year, and the cost is whatever results in that reduction. The cost per amount of reduction in either case is precisely the same.
There will be complaints that some of the cost will fall upon the poor. That, however, is an easily-corrected problem. For example, the revenue from selling the permits could be used, in part, to replace the taxes going towards Social Security and Medicare from the lowest incomes.