Over the last six years or so, picking up the morning paper has been such a depressing experience that I have often chosen to skip it. But on January 19, in the middle of my east-coast book tour, I woke in Boston and picked up The Boston Globe. The lead story reported that Gov. Deval Patrick had not only rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that his predecessor, Mitt Romney, had pulled out of, but had also decided to auction 100% of the carbon emission permits Massachusetts will soon issue.
My head still agog at that story, I picked up the New York Times and read that a coalition of large corporations was urging resident Bush to cap carbon emissions nationally. On top of that, Democrats were scurrying around Washington saying that, besides stopping the war in Iraq, curbing global warming was a top priority.
By the time I met later in the day with New England climate activists, I was in a state of extreme giddiness. We had all been fighting for years to get state and national governments to address climate change – and to do so without giving the sky away to large polluting corporations (by giving them free rights to emit carbon dioxide in the future). A few months earlier, Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York had announced that he would auction 100% of New York’s carbon emission permits and use the proceeds for energy efficiency. Now, Massachusetts was making New York’s bold but utterly sensible move a trend. And global corporations were getting so concerned they wanted to cut a carbon deal while George Bush was still in the White House!
What particularly gladdened my heart was a sentence buried further down in The Boston Globe story: “A spokesman for Associated Industries of Massachusetts [the power companies’ lobbying group] said the group knows that the new fees are inevitable, but its leaders declined Patrick’s invitation to attend yesterday’s announcement because they don’t want to appear overly supportive.” My jaw literally dropped when I read the word “inevitable.”
All of a sudden, the winds of climate policy had shifted 180 degrees. Now, the burden of proof was on the climate deniers – and on the corporations who, until then, had brazenly assumed they would receive free carbon emission permits worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
I couldn’t help but reflect back to the days, nearly ten years ago, when I first began to argue that the sky is a commons that belongs to everyone. If we start from that assumption, I pointed out, the solution to climate change becomes self-evident: cap private emissions into the commons, charge market prices for the allowed emissions, and use the revenue for the common good (including dividends to commons “owners”).
This “sky trust” model was studied by economists and the Congressional Budget Office and given the highest possible marks for simplicity, fairness and practicality. Yet neither politicians nor environmental groups wanted to touch it. The only imaginable way forward in those cynical days was to “bribe” fossil fuel companies into accepting carbon caps by offering them billions of dollars in gifts from the commons. Anything else was said to be “just not realistic.”
The lesson here is that political winds do shift. We’re still a long way from a commons-based climate solution, but at least some politicians are thinking and acting from a place of integrity. Immense credit goes to state and local activists who pushed their leaders hard while Washington fumbled. And equal credit goes to Governors Pataki, Spitzer and Patrick for being much less mesmerized by corporate lobbyists than their national counterparts have been.
The climate battleground now shifts to California and Congress. But a fresh wind is blowing. And after 2008, almost anything could be possible.