That Carbon Dividend Plan? It Would End Liability For Energy Cos, Regulatory Authority Over GHGs
On Wednesday, former senators Trent Lott (R-MS) and John Breaux (D-LA) announced, with a big public relations blitz, a new campaign, Americans for Carbon Dividends, to address the threat of climate change. The effort is being heralded as a breakthrough by some because it is endorsed by big oil and gas companies Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Total, and it calls for a $40-a-ton carbon tax, incurred at the source of emissions, with revenues to be returned to citizens as dividends, perhaps $2000 a year for each American family of four.
A Lott-Breaux op-ed in the New York Times presents the deal as a compelling bipartisan solution and touts the support not only of oil companies but also the non-profit Nature Conservancy. The campaign website lists a bunch of newspaper and environmental group endorsements for the underlying $40 carbon tax concept, which was proposed last year under the banner of a group called the Climate Leadership Council, launched by Republican former secretaries of state James Baker and George Shultz and other conservatives, and now including oil companies and various establishment Democrats and Republicans.
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“Much of the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide emissions would be phased out, including an outright repeal of the Clean Power Plan,” according to the Lott-Breaux campaign site. That’s a reference to the 2015 plan issued by the Obama administration to control greenhouse gas emissions, after Congress rejected climate change legislation in 2009. The Trump administration is trying to kill the plan, but they will need to win a court battle to do so. Some critics are calling the new initiative an empty public relations gesture on the part of the fossil fuel companies, and just maybe it is: A carbon tax is unlikely to pass Congress in the present environment. Even if it did, energy companies would likely be able to pass the costs of a new carbon tax on to consumers, thus wiping out the gains of the promised dividend checks. But properly constructed, a carbon tax could perhaps achieve many of the aims of the Clean Power Plan.
However, there’s another twist. The Lott-Breaux website adds, as the penultimate sentence in their plan outline, something the Lott-Breaux Times op-ed conveniently omits: “Robust carbon taxes would also make possible an end to federal and state tort liability for emitters.” (The Climate Leadership Council calls for the same outcome in one of its documents and a more vague prescription in another.) That gentle formulation seems to mean this: The plan proponents are insisting that a solution must bar everyone and anyone from suing fossil fuel companies for the harms done by global warming — past, present, and future.
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So the fossil fuel companies want badly to get rid of these cases. And now, they have joined hands with Lott and Breaux for a comprehensive climate change solution, one that would let them off the hook for enormous potential liability for past and ongoing harms. (The case law is not entirely settled as to whether a federal ban on liability would conclusively bar all such state tort law suits, given the constitutional due process rights of those injured, but for the fossil fuel industries, it’s certainly worth a try.) The effort includes some deceptions already. Linked to a page on the Lott-Breaux campaign site called “Who Supports” is a June 20 statement from the pro-environment Union of Concerned Scientists. But that UCS statement, while praising the concept of a carbon tax, expressly opposes key elements of the new Lott-Bureaux package: the trading away of government regulations and the rights of municipalities to obtain compensation for climate change harms. The statement concludes: “Taking away legal rights and rolling back public health safeguards are clearly not in the American public’s interest.” In addition to overstating support for the plan and soft-pedaling the oil companies’ demand for immunity from ongoing lawsuits, Lott, Breaux, and company aren’t offering all the details of the financial incentives behind the new coalition.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/06/22/oil-companies-and-lobbyists-say-they-re-ready-solve-climate-change-check-fine-print