Negligible and Damaging: Why the Left Should Not Support Carbon Taxes
Climate change is no longer some distant, year 2100, problem for the future. We are already in the midst of it and can see an even bigger climate monster on the horizon. Jess Spear argues that carbon taxes and other market schemes not only won’t get us to net-zero carbon emissions fast enough to avoid major climate disruption, they also create barriers to building a powerful mass working-class environmental movement.
The earth is warming, and getting more dangerous. Weather patterns are rapidly changing. Unpredictable and devastating events are on the rise: 100-year floods occurring instead every few years, severe drought and increased wildfires, and crop failure.
It doesn’t end there. The oceans are rising and becoming more acidic. Millimeter by millimeter, small island nations and coastal cities are going under. Many species, on land and in water, cannot cope with the relatively speedy rate of change. Millions are expected to go extinct by the end of the century. Over 1 billion people are expected to live in “insufferable heat” by 2070.
To avoid an unmitigated disaster, 80% of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground. The remaining 20%, also known as our “carbon budget”, must be used to transition society away from fossil fuels as fast as we can, or things will go from bad to worse.
Based on the carbon budget, a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set a target of 2050 for global net zero emissions. That means by that time, our entire society will have to have transitioned to clean, renewable energy, everywhere. From the raw materials used in production to the way we get around, every aspect of our lives must be decarbonised.
Advanced capitalist economies, like Ireland, have a responsibility to hit net zero emissions much sooner than developing countries like India or Brazil with large numbers of impoverished people. For that reason, some environmental activists in Ireland are demanding a deadline of net zero emissions by 2030.
To reach the 2050 target, global leaders, with their heads finally out of the climate-denialist sand, are now peddling carbon taxes as the “best way to mitigate climate change”. Headlines abound, “A carbon tax is ‘single most powerful’ way to combat climate change, IMF says” and “Technology won’t fix climate change. Only a carbon tax will”. Exxon now supports it. Hell, even the IPCC includes carbon pricing in their models for reducing emissions, though they clearly state we need “carbon prices much higher than the ones observed in real markets…”
A good chunk of the environmental movement also promotes it as part of the “polluter pays” principle, saying something along the lines of, “every serious climate change plan includes carbon pricing”. Should the left support carbon taxes? What about a carbon tax that includes a dividend to working families? Considering the possible perilous future ahead, are carbon taxes a necessary part of fighting climate change in the here and now?
If you price it high enough, alternatives will come
Carbon pricing or carbon taxes are meant to incentivise people and businesses to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable, “green” options. The idea is to gradually increase the cost of fossil fuels such that, over the short term, workers use less of it and, over the long term, workers and businesses make purchase choices to avoid it. So for example, if the price of petrol went up €1/L you might make less trips in the car. When you go to purchase a new car you might consider a hybrid or electric vehicle instead of a petrol vehicle. The same would go for businesses, big and small. And so, gradually and gently, we’ll all move in the right direction. Makes sense.
Additionally, if fossil fuel corporations know the price of their product will go up, causing a drop in demand, they’ll expand into renewables. They’ll recognise the end of their industry is nigh and join us hand in hand as we build a greener world together, with profits ever flowing (to the top of course). Totally believable.
The other argument is about money. We’ll need a massive amount of money to fund green jobs, from the energy sector to healthcare and transport. Carbon taxes can help bridge the gap. But, that’s only if you keep all the revenue and don’t return it to working families in an annual rebate.
Schemes and more schemes
Remember that before carbon taxes became so popular there were carbon trading schemes (“cap and trade” as part of the Kyoto Protocol) and a carbon market. The idea is that pollution permits are sold to companies and industries, which then trade amongst each other based on the needs of the market and adaptability. The big polluters are meant to be balanced out by those that innovate or reduce their overall emissions, thereby reducing overall the global greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere.
Added to the mix were “carbon offsets”, schemes that ranged from moving production from the Global North to the Global South, which just shifted emissions from one country to another, to funding infrastructure projects that don’t in themselves reduce emissions, like hydro-electric dams.
One of the offset schemes allowed rich countries to pay poor countries not to cut down their forests. This is effectively a further enclosing of the commons, commodifying living ecosystems inhabited by indigenous peoples to be bought and sold by companies to offset their emissions. To “protect” the carbon offsetting capacity of the forest, governments have forcibly evicted indigenous people, blocking them from accessing and living off the forest as they have done for generations.
On top of the brutality, these market schemes also miserably failed to deliver. The reasons were predictable: intense lobbying resulted in business-friendly loopholes, too many permits were handed out, too many “offsets” weren’t in fact reducing pollution, and shockingly many permits were just given away for free, removing the whole market incentive to reduce pollution! So, on went emissions, rising year after year. We’re now at 418 ppm (parts per million air molecules), a level the earth hasn’t seen in roughly 3 million years when it was around 3 degrees warmer and sea level was probably 10-20 meters higher than today.
Yet, all the data showing their failure hasn’t stopped the pushing of pro-market policies. In the last 10 years carbon taxes have proliferated. An annual report commissioned by the World Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2019, shows that 96 countries (comprising 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions) are either already using carbon taxes, are planning to use them, or are considering using them to meet their Paris Agreement commitments. Indeed, the Paris Climate Agreement included the development of a new Global Carbon Market.
Why not?
It’s not as if the pro-market policy pushers don’t see that market policies have failed. They argue that this time we’ll have more stringent rules, this time we’ll have less loopholes, better accounting. We’ve learned the lessons, they say, we’ll get it right this time.
Whether it’s carbon markets or carbon taxes, neither deal with the fundamental root of the issue - capitalism and the drive to produce ever more commodities. While taxing fossil fuels sounds reasonable, it doesn’t build the solar panels, wind turbines, and mass public transport we need now. At best it nudges the system, ever so gently.
Furthermore, without the necessary investment in infrastructure like free public transport and retrofitting grants covering 100% of the costs, how can the vast majority of working people make the switch? They’ll just have to fork over more money they don't have.
Take electric cars, for example. The government set a target of 250,000 electric cars by 2020. Set to miss that target by an embarrassing 241,000, they rolled up their blue-shirts and quadrupled it to 1,000,000 electric cars by 2030. Nevermind the fact that many families can’t afford even a regular ol’ petrol car. We’ll just up the car tax and petrol costs and force ‘em to switch.
Ask Macron how that worked out for him in France. The yellow vests movement demonstrates that working people will not accept eco-austerity. Nor should we. Why should working people be forced to pay for a snail-paced transition that scientists warn isn’t enough, when we can see the enormous wealth hoarded by bailed-out billionaires?
Carbon taxes not only distract us from the radical restructuring required to dramatically lower emissions now, they anger and alienate working people from environmental policy. They fertilise the conspiracy theory soil and further drive people away from scientific facts that demand urgent action now; and they signal to workers that, once again, like with the economic recession, you and your family must make huge sacrifices to fix a problem you didn’t create and you have no control over. If the environmental movement does not clearly come out against a carbon tax on working-class communities, it will severely damage our ability to build a mass movement actually capable of bringing about the rapid and radical systemic changes the science demands.
Even if you passed a tax which returned a dividend to lower income families, the effects are negligible, and it would necessitate an almighty propaganda battle to ensure workers are crystal clear they stand to benefit from it. Frankly, we don’t have time for that. We have less than 10 years left to transition before enough greenhouse gases are emitted and we’re locked into a world of climate chaos. Thankfully, and with huge effort by the emerging climate justice movement, the debate within the overall environmental movement is shifting from eco-austerity, “we all have to sacrifice”, “humans are to blame” to pro-worker, pro-environmental policies packaged as a “Green New Deal” and focused on restructuring society from the bottom up.