While we’re in agreement that the privilege to pollute our common atmosphere must come at a price - hence the auctioning of emissions allowances to ensure polluters play - and we’re in complete agreement that investment is as necessary as regulation. However, you should be careful in calling for 100% of the auction revenues to be invested in clean energy technology development and deployment. A sizable chunk of that revenue should be invested in clean, sustainable, and just energy sources. But there are many other viable and worthwhile uses of some of the revenues:

-Make the tax structure more progressive (expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, reduce regressive payroll taxes, or give refunds for energy assistance to low income families) to help make up for increased energy costs up front.

-Invest in climate disaster preparedness and response funds. Never again should the population of an American city be caught as unprepared and then abandoned by our government as the citizens of New Orleans were before/after Hurricane Katrina. Some degree of warming and climatic disasters are assured at this point, and we must adequately prepare for them.

-Invest in assistance to developing countries to help them raise their standard of living without raising their emissions. Think clean development assistance.

-Invest in ecological restoration and conservation to help undo some of the ecological havoc we’re wreaking.

-And here’s another that should be in the minds of young climate activists (this is kind of part of the investment paradigm, but deserves to be called out): we need to fully fund and invest in our public education systems, both K-12, community and technical colleges, and universities, as centers to train, empower, and otherwise prepare youth and community members for their roles in the necessary transition to a sustainable, just, and prosperous energy future.

The point is that we should be advocating that under any carbon regulation, polluters should pay - no windfall profits for private companies - and that the funds generated by this regulation should be used for the public good. That includes investment for sure, which should be a large chunk of the funds, but there are other uses as well that we shouldn’t ignore.

Remember that when we’re talking about a cap-and-auction, we’re talking about a lot of money, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars a year. We can afford to spread some of it around. (Politically speaking, we also earn support from other constituencies by spreading the funds around).

Thanks for all the great feedback. It sounds like we actually agree on a lot of points. I agree with you that we need a big and bold activism. I’m simply saying that protests are a tactic that should be used strategically to advance a larger vision – hence the word transcend instead of “leave behind.”

And no doubt there has been incredible political progress, and the climate movement is influencing the polls. But unfortunately the center remains far from bold action. By and large, global warming ranks extremely low among voter priorities and energy prices are of utmost and growing concern. No wonder Californians rejected a proposition (Prop 87) last year that would have funded clean energy through an oil tax. And no surprise that the Washington Post runs front-page articles like “Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats,” or that Pew polls continue to find global warming ranking nearly dead last out of the top 20 voter priorities.

It’s easy to get swept up in the enormous urgency surrounding this climate crisis. But as you know, we’ve got to be smart and make sure we have the clarity and strategic vision for the long term in what will certainly be a lifetime of effort. We need that big and bold federal policy in spring 2009. But we also need to make sure that we’re investing our efforts in ways that will give us the tools we need to construct a clean energy economy over the next half century.

So what this mean? Here’s what I’m suggesting:

No Regulation Without Investment: Let’s make sure we’re thinking ahead and pushing for the policies we need. We can’t afford to have a federal carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that doesn’t auction the permits and invest 100% of the proceeds into developing, demonstrating, and commercializing clean energy technologies and systems – a new Apollo / Manhattan / Marshall Project. A wide range of policies aimed at increasing conservation, efficiency, and reducing emissions is vital, but prices and regulations alone will not create new, clean and affordable energy systems soon enough or at the scale needed to provide our generation with the tools we need in the decades to come.

Apollo Energy Sciences Project: We need a science/math/engineering initiative among youth modeled after the post-Sputnik Cold War effort that excites and encourages young adults to invest their education into green innovation and the energy sciences. The Campus Climate Challenge has done wonders for establishing new campus energy policies and training young organizers for today’s fight, but there hasn’t been enough emphasis on the need for a massive energy sciences education project that is truly long-term in its approach to central challenge we face: innovation.

On Friday here at Johns Hopkins, we held the kickoff event for the JHU Green Idea Generator. It brought out almost 100 students and faulty, and there were 12 unique green projects presented by students. More and more I’m seeing this as a post-Campus Climate Challenge model (or its next project). Organizing and establishing policy is important, but we’ve really got to start focusing equally on getting young people doing the hands-on, experiential, and innovation work.

My 2 cents,
Teryn

Your comment is exactly the point of my post. It is not either or. It is both. The main point I was trying to make is that our vision must include what we are for and what we are not for. While we are communicating this positive, forceful vision of a clean, just, sustainable energy future beyond coal and oil, we do actually have to oppose coal and oil. We have to stand in solidarity with the communities who have been fighting new power plants, mining, and drilling for decades. And we have to continue to remind people that we are reaching a planetary crisis. If we do that, we will recognize that people, when put to the test, can actually walk and chew gum at the same time. They can be afraid of rising seas and runaway drought without shutting down getting cynical. They can regulate and innovate at the same time. What I am talking about is one of the core principles of the Campus Climate Challenge. That this crisis requires that we must both challenge our leaders and ourselves at the same time. We must make change on our campuses AND put the challenge toward political and corporate leaders.

Innovate and regulate. Push the whole vision. And don’t let up until we get it!

I agree that Michael and Ted often take a very confrontational tone towards mainstream environmentalists. They also sometimes seem to fall into the false either-or mentality, at least in some of their writings. But after conversing with them, and with Teryn, I know that they do not believe that regulation is not going to be a critical part of the equation. That’s why I wrote my post calling for a “cease fire” between the Break Through folks and the big green groups.

But Ted and Michael are right that mainstream enviro groups often focus on the investment part as a sort of afterthought, not as an integral part of transitioning into a carbon-neutral, prosperous, and sustainable energy future.

You write, “we need an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. This regulation alone would do far more than any new investment program to keep countless tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.”

Saying no new coal is great. We need that moratorium. But what are we going to replace that coal with? If not nukes, or natural gas, then what? If we want to replace coal with cheap, plentiful renewable energy and energy efficiency, then we are going to need major investments in those technologies to drive down their costs, unleash innovation to develop a new generation of clean energy technologies and create the sustainable energy future we need to replace the fossil-fuel addicted energy system we have now.

Again: it’s not a matter of either-or, regulation or investment.

As I wrote in my post about Michael and Ted:

Putting a price on carbon is necessary to send the correct market signals and to spur private sector innovation. But this innovation can and must be accelerated by public-sector research and investment, as it should be. We’ve got to make the transition to a carbon neutral, prosperous America as quickly as possible, and that requires public as well as private investment in our common future. Auctioning emissions allowances or taxing emissions can not only send the right market signals to the private sector, but can also raise the necessary billions in funding for massive public investment to drive down the cost of clean energy technologies, a down-payment on a carbon-neutral, prosperous America.

It breaks down like this, in my opinion:

1) We need to put a price on carbon emissions to harness the innovation and power of markets to find solutions to the climate crisis and ensure we reduce global warming pollution to a safe level.

2) The atmosphere is a common good, owned by all Americans, not just polluters. We should therefore force polluters to pay for the privilege to emit global warming pollution, raising billions of dollars in the process.

3) Putting a price on carbon is necessary as is forcing polluters to pay for their mess, but doing so will raise energy prices. The good news is, it will also raise a lot of money that can be pumped into making sure average Americans end up better off than before. We can do this in two ways:

a) we can pump much of that money into accelerating the transformation of our energy economy to a sustainable, low-carbon system. We can provide incentives to lower the costs of clean energy technologies, provide R&D and fund public-private partnerships to accelerate the deployment of the next generation of clean energy technologies and support the innovation fueled by the carbon regulation itself, all the while building a new energy economy and millions of “green collar” jobs.

b) we can use some of the money to reform our tax structure so that it is more progressive and leaves more money in the pockets of average Americans. These reforms will more than offset the increases (if any) in your energy bill (remember that increased efficiency can offset the effects of increased energy prices too) so in the end, the average American will be better off under a cap-and-auction system than her or she was before.

That’s the recipe for a carbon-neutral, prosperous America in my mind, and it doesn’t seem like I’d get much argument from environmentalists or from Nordhaus and Shellenberger on that point.

This is the platform that we should all be rallying behind, rather than fighting over which is better, regulation or investment. The answer is that neither will solve the climate crisis without the other - and we all seem to be in agreement there too!