Corporate America Is Terrified of the Green New Deal

As this article argues, a carbon tax allows polluters to continue to pollute as long as they pay up. It does not guarantee emission reductions. It does not put polluters out of business.

There’s a reason more big businesses are pushing for a carbon tax—and it’s not because they want to fight climate change.

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There is a “major shift” afoot in corporate America on climate change, according to Axios. On Monday, energy reporter Amy Harder reported that major companies “across virtually all sectors of the economy, including big oil producers, are beginning to lobby Washington, D.C., to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions.” These companies, in other words, are asking the government to make them pay more in taxes in an effort to solve global warming.

It’s not as surprising as it sounds. For several years now, the heads of oil companies like Suncor and ExxonMobil and BP have been publicly calling for a carbon tax, in which the government would charge polluters for every ton of climate-warming gases they emit. They’re doing this because a carbon tax, as a market-based policy rather than a mandated regulation, is the most business-friendly solution being floated in Washington.

So why are corporations so passionate about a carbon? “It’s not really about saving the planet,” Harder noted. Indeed, in the face of growing public support for climate action, these companies increasingly realize they need to throw their weight behind some kind of climate policy. They want a carbon tax because it doesn’t threaten the industry’s very existence and allows them to keep polluting—so long as they pay for it.

But a carbon tax isn’t just corporate America’s favorite option; it’s the only option. The only serious mainstream alternative to a carbon tax is terrifying to corporations: an aggressive climate plan that doesn’t cooperate with polluters, but seeks to put them out of business.

A carbon tax does not appear in the Green New Deal—at least, not the version popularized by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. It doesn’t appear in Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s $5 trillion plan to fight global warming. Even Washington Governor Jay Inslee—who is running for president explicitly on climate change and who spent his career trying to enact a fee on carbon—doesn’t include a carbon tax in his $9 trillion climate jobs plan.

There are many reasons for the absence of a tax in these plans, but the main one appears to be that it doesn’t guarantee emissions reductions. Democrats are starting to realize that drastic action is necessary to prevent catastrophe, and a carbon tax simply isn’t drastic enough. MORE