Earth Equity News

Time to 'Cowboy Up' and Pay Carbon Taxes. Commentary by Auden Schendler, High Country News, February 24, 2009. "We have a saying here in Colorado when someone is sniveling too much. The term is 'cowboy up'... A contemporary example of the need to cowboy up occurs in, of all places, the politics of climate change. Here's how: It's seen as gospel these days that to mention the T-word (taxes) is political suicide. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of climate policy, where virtually all politicos recognize the need to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. But few are willing to buck up and talk about taxing carbon, a simple solution to climate change... Cap-and-trade requires that major polluters such as electric utilities and big industries measure and report their emissions. That's where things get messy... It's tough to figure out what you're emitting... For example: I work for a ski resort, a miniscule business relative to what we'll be regulating under cap-and-trade. We made a good-faith effort to track our emissions, tallying utility bills and diesel usage, gasoline purchases and propane consumption. Three years into our audited cap-and-trade commitment through the Chicago Climate Exchange -- an early, voluntary effort at cap-and-trade -- we discovered we hadn't been counting fuel from part of the company... If we failed to accurately track our emissions -- doing it voluntarily and in good faith and with a third-party auditor -- what will happen when a multinational corporation tries to Enron or Madoff the system? This doesn't even address the fact that cap-and-trade creates a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy to measure, audit and regulate the beast. A carbon tax avoids all this messiness... The European Union early on demonstrated the problems with cap-and-trade. They grossly overestimated existing emissions, issued too many permits and caused the price of carbon -- the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide -- to crash. Carbon trading often resembled, to use a tired analogy, the Wild West. That's why we need to cowboy up and stop whining that carbon taxation is politically impossible." Auden Schendlerdirects sustainability programs for the Aspen Skiing Co. in Colorado and is the author of the new book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.