Carbon Fees Can and Should Be Imposed by the President Without Delay
On January 25, 2021, the renowned climate scientist James E. Hansen and CPR Initiative’s Dan Galpern wrote to President Biden and key members of his Climate Team.
Hansen and Galpern urged the President to:
“make full use of a powerful tool already at your disposal to accelerate the necessary decarbonization of our power, industrial, agricultural, and transportation systems. That is, direct the EPA to . . . impose a revenue-neutral carbon fee,”
via invocation of “the Independent Offices Appropriation Act (IOAA), 31 U.S.C. §9701.”
In a public follow-up in the Boston Globe, Hansen and Galpern, urged the President to impose such a carbon fee “immediately,” even “[a]s the public experiences an increased frequency of extreme climate events, as young people worldwide cry out against the threat to their future, and as the United Nations approaches a major climate conference in November in Glasgow.”
They noted as well that “[i]f China and the United States agree on meaningful carbon fees, they can readily make it near-global via border duties on products from countries without carbon fees; that would encourage most nations to adopt the policy, so as to retain such revenue for their own people [and] help to further [President] Biden’s goal of addressing what he has aptly termed the “existential climate threat.”
CPR Initiative Petition
President Biden:
Impose Carbon Fees on Oil, Gas and Coal Without Delay
Dear Mr. President:
We agree with your determination to address what you aptly have called the “existential climate threat.” Here we respectfully urge you to utilize your full executive authority to rapidly phase out fossil fuel emissions.
Accordingly, we urge you to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to impose a rising fee on fossil fuels. Such carbon fees may be collected from the companies that produce, refine, and distribute fossil fuels in the U.S. To protect people from any ensuing rising cost, revenues should be distributed to households as annual dividends.
The imposition of carbon fees is a highly cost-effective means of securing the critical goals that you set for the nation on April 22, 2021, including “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035” and elimination of “carbon pollution from the transportation sector.”
We urge you to impose such a rising carbon fee without delay.
Notable Signatories:
James E. Hansen
Director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Earth Institute, Columbia University & former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
E. Donald Elliott
Former General Counsel
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Donn J. Viviani
President, Climate Protection & Restoration Initiative; retired EPA scientist
Lise Van Susteren
Physician, Board Member: Physicians for Social Responsibility, Earth Day Network, Climate Psychiatry Alliance, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, CPR Initiative
Mark Reynolds
Executive Director
Citizens’ Climate Lobby
Tim Crosland
Director, Plan B
(planb.earth)
Richard Heede
Director of Climate Accountability Institute, Carbon Majors Initiative
Wil Burns
Co-Director at Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy
Mary Wood
Professor of Law, University of Oregon School of Law and author of Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age
Jennifer Francis
Senior Scientist, Woodwell Climate Research Center Rutgers University; Council delegate for the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Dominick DellaSalla
Chief Scientist at Wild Heritage, a Project of the Earth Island Institute, and former President of the Society for Conservation Biology, North America Section.
Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh
Assistant Professor of Public International Law, Leiden University. Author of State Responsibility, Climate Change and Human Rights (2019)
John Birks
Professor Emeritus
Atmospheric Chemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder
Curt Johnson
President/CEO of Save the Sound
Bob Triest
Chair, Department of Economics at Northeastern University. Formerly, Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Chad Hanson
Ecologist, John Muir Project
Dan Esty
Professor, Yale Law School and Yale School of the Environment
Richard Ottinger
Dean Emeritus, Pace University Law School; Founder, Chair, Pace Law School Energy and Climate Center, Chair Emeritus, Environmental and Energy Study Institute
Daphne Wysham
Chief Executive Officer, Methane Action
John Fitzgerald
CPR Initiative Board Member, Environmental Investigation Agency; Government Relations attorney and consultant, Methane Action
Joanna Campe
Executive Director, Remineralize the Earth
Stuart Scott (Deceased)
Executive Director & Executive Producer, FacingFuture.Earth, FacingFuture.TV, UPFSI.org