My truck started up and my bees are going strong! I just wanted put some good news out there. When i was at Harvard, i built what i called the Evolution Machine. It rocks 96 test tubes back and forth in a salt water brine, and holds an electrode in each test tube at a constant voltage, and reads the current consumed by the tube at femtoAmp levels. Actually, it can detect femtoAmps and it reads picoAmps reliably. It can be used to evolve a microbe that will consume CO2 and electrons to produce a combustible liquid fuel. We are focusing to begin with on production of acetate, which is an intermediary carbon that can be converted into a gasoline substitute through further processing. We were making progress, but i had other things to do, and we needed a larger team. It was just me and one microbial biologist who specialized in extremophiles, primarily. Ive been thinking and reading and talking about a carbon tax for years now, and while i am not an economist by training, i do have a mind for systems thinking, and have studied sociology including international development/ Ive done systems anthropology in Nepal, critiqued the World Bank and IMF on a discourse level, worked on the MIT solar car, and been arrested protesting the World Bank and also protesting the original invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001. A war for which were still paying and that has increased the threat level, if anything. But to get down to the matters here, i can see a place for a progressive carbon tax as being the major policy tool to lower emissions to slow global warming and lessen the risks that we will go over some major tipping point and kick in feedback loops from hell -- and there is clearly no guarantee that were safe even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gases today. A progressive carbon tax along the lines of the fee-and-dividend promoted by James Hansen and many others, would lower emissions. Border adjustments would encourage other polities to adopt a similar tax. It would help and i see it as the best option on the table, if we could get our collective will together to demand it with threat of collapse of the system. The World Bank and IMF and others have been frequently stating their desire for a carbon tax of late, as have some conservative think tanks, but these models of carbon taxation would almost certainly be regressive, cutting corporate taxes or other taxes on capital, instead of benefiting the poor and working poor. All the more reason we must get our collective will together and understand the landscape of the debate, and know what is acceptable and what is not. I am strongly anti-capitalist but i respect the organizational power of the free market. I think we can use the free market if we determine the values upon which it operates, through a carbon tax, for example, and if we use it to counteract the tendency for capital to beget capital, leading to the ultimate extreme of all the money being in the hands of an elite few -- which is the situation today. I dont think we need to have an *exact* number to which to limit carbon, but we do have a pretty fair working guideline provided by Hansen, and a carbon tax is not a carbon budget, per se, but works like a brake pedal -- the harder you push, the more it slows the vehicle. You adjust the pressure in a feedback loop according to what you want the vehicle to do. We can use it like that. We can raise the tax as needed. It would start at a certain level and then rise predictably but can be adjusted harder if needed. As to the concepts of growth versus fossil fuels, why is that out of the question? Why cant we have an economy in which more value is created even while less fossil fuels are being burned? Production needs to be reorganized, and it will be if we raise the cost of fossil fuels. The effect permeates the entire economy, causing every product dependent on fossil fuels to rise, and causing peoples actions and behaviors to change. People conserve more energy, people find alternatives, the value of investment in new technologies rises, and more money flows there. Im not a capitalist but i still see this as the way to do it in the present world, short of revolution and nobody has a blueprint for a good revolution yet. Ive been in the middle of a Maoist revolution, too, by the way, in Nepal, and seen the dynamics of such a thing. We dont *need* growth and i am not pining for the GDP to rise -- i would rather see the Gross Happiness rise. And that is another reason im in favor of a strong progressive carbon tax. It would bring us closer to the garden, closer to living in harmony with nature once again. It would help us to slow down, and be more thoughtful, and make better decisions in ecological terms. It would lead to a lot more work in good sectors, like more local food production, energy conservation retrofits and new construction, more appropriate technology in every regard, fewer long-distance imports, far far less coal and fracked gas (especially if fracking leakage is accounted in the carbon tax), and far more solar and wind and hydro and all other renewable and cleaner energy. It would change architecture, and it would change culture. Green would be the New Black instead of Orange. Peoples small talk would be more about how to save money by saving energy. There is so much technology waiting in the wings to be developed to scale. I personally worked on an ARPA-E grant at Harvard to make liquid fuels from microbial catalysis with solar electricity as an input and CO2 as the other input. This does work and can be ramped up given the market motivation. There are 10,000 other technologies like these ready to go prime time. Maybe 1 in 1,000 will be truly useful, but to find these requires the pull of the market to cause the investment to do the research. And a dividend of $1,000 per year per person, rising to $3,000 per yer per person would go a long way toward offsetting the average persons extra cost in energy usage. In fact by various estimates around half of the people would actually make money on the whole with a carbon tax of the Hansen type. One further aspect, very very important, is that the struggle for a progressive carbon tax is essentially a milquetoast means to polarize the required struggle against the injustices and extremes of capitalism. It will highlight that capital is working against the people and the planet, and it will begin the massive struggle that needs to happen. And yet it is not a military attack, but a simple one-page law proposal that will be fought tooth-and-nail by the fossil fuel industry, and opposed by dirty industries, while we the people need to be strongly united to fight the good fight in every realm. I hope these comments are useful and received in good spirit, and spark further dialogue. Thanks for listening.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 23:17:44 +0000
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