SeekerBlog

An honest effective approach to energy and climate must place a steadily rising price on carbon emissions. It can only be effective if it is a simple flat fee on all carbon fuels, collected from fossil fuel companies on the first sale, at the mine, wellhead or port of entry.

The fee will cause energy costs to rise, for fossil fuels, not all energies. The public will allow this fee to rise to the levels needed only if the money collected is given to the public. They will need the money to adapt their lifestyles and reduce their carbon footprint. The money, all of it, should be given as a monthly “green cheque” and possibly in part as an income-tax reduction. Each legal adult resident would get an equal share, easily delivered electronically to bank accounts or debit cards, with half a share for children up to two children per family.

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That perspective comes from Dr. James Hansen, in an op-ed for The Australian. There are further Hansen quotes in a short 10 March news article “James Hansen keen on next-generation nuclear power”:

RENEWABLE energy won’t save the planet so it’s time to go nuclear, according to one of world’s most high-profile climate scientists.

“We should undertake urgent focused research and development programs in next generation nuclear power,” said atmospheric physicist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.

While renewable energies such as solar and wind were gaining in economic competition with coal-fired plants, Professor Hansen said they wouldn’t be able to provide baseload power for years to come.

Even in Germany, which pushed renewables heavily, they generated only 7 per cent of the nation’s power.

“It’s just too expensive,” said Professor Hansen, an expert in climate modelling, planetary atmospheres and the Earth’s climate.

I will defer to the energy policy economists, such as Yale’s William Nordhaus, on the relative cost-benefit of paying the dividend as monthly “green cheques” as Hansen proposes. Personally I prefer applying the bulk of the dividend to cuts in payroll taxes. Payroll tax cuts create a power incentive towards jobs and more work by the employed.