Need to educate Jesse Jenkins and Ezra Klein on carbon fee and dividend

In the Ezra Klein podcast below he talks with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Flegal about the IRA and the BBB. At about 1:11:00 they start talking about carbon taxes and it's the same old thing - they never mention a dividend!

3 Replies

Well it's discussed in the context of a potential broad tax reform effort in 2029, @Nancy Jacobson. In that context a dividend is less relevant because it's not a stand-alone bill, and the question would be whether the package as a whole achieves similar aims as carbon fee & dividend, for example by ensuring that low- and middle-income households come out ahead in the process of applying a price to carbon pollution while making other changes to the tax code. I thought Ezra Klein made good points along those lines. We also discussed it over at the Nerd Corner. Jesse is certainly familiar with CF&D and I would assume Ezra Klein is too.

John Gage
239 Posts

@Nancy Jacobson - Jesse Jenkins knows the details of the carbon fee and dividend policy proposal. The NH municipal CF&D resolution project (carboncashback.org) produced good press coverage, including an episode on the NHPR show, “The Exchange," featuring Jenkins, me, and someone from E&E:

After the show, I connected with Jenkins and have had occasional DMs back and forth on Twitter/X. I recently shared my latest article with him, “The Growing U.S. Carbon Price Gap."

The problem is that he's been saying carbon pricing isn't going to happen in the U.S. ever since he did his postdoc dissertation on it. He shared two articles with me that he's had published about why he thinks carbon pricing is unlikely in the U.S.:

Jenkins brushed away a carbon pricing question in the CCL “Ask an Expert” session he participated in a year or two ago.

Apparently, he does not believe in the effectiveness of the “creating political will” mission of CCL.

And with CCL putting CF&D on the back burner for the past few years, it's no wonder climate talking heads from Jenkins to Bill McKibbons continue to claim we're a long way from a U.S. carbon price. This is why I'm working to reset CCL's Focus core value back to the original laser focus on creating political will for CF&D. CCL founder Marshall Saunders called his army of 200,000 laser-focused on CF&D CCL volunteers “a dream come true" at summer conferences, but that core value was changed by CCL leaders shortly after we lost Marshall.

John Gage
239 Posts

@Dana Nuccitelli, but most Ezra Klein and Jesse Jenkins fans are unfamiliar with the cash-back carbon fee approach. This was yet another missed opportunity to explain how a cash-back carbon fee works for people and a CBAM works for U.S. businesses and holds other countries accountable to a wide audience. Failure to explain the basics of CF&D with a CBAM on such a widely listened-to podcast is a big problem from a creating political will perspective.

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