• Home
  • Clients
  • FAQ
  • The Lab
  • Campaigns
  Progressive Public Affairs
Connect:

Perverse opportunity: IL, other states pollute so much more than current cap-and-trade states

12/23/2014

0 Comments

 
By Dan Johnson

Illinois pollutes more than California.

And Indiana pollutes more than Illinois.

Those two pieces of data floored me. 

Here's the list, by state, of greenhouse gas pollution:
Picture

The top 10 states with the most pollution, in rough order and with rough estimates from the 8/18/14 reports to the EPA of 2013 Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Large Faciliities, are

  1. Texas, 410M tons
  2. Indiana, 150M tons
  3. Pennsylvania, 148M tons
  4. Illinois, 140M tons
  5. Louisiana, 138M tons
  6. Ohio, 136M tons
  7. Florida, 125M tons
  8. California, 110M tons
  9. Kentucky, 108M tons
  10. Alabama, 101M tons

California  is the only one of the top top states to charge polluters. Washington State only has 25 tons of pollution! And if that program goes through, they on track to raise a billion dollars from charging the market price for carbon pollution.

What an opportunity for these other 9 states!

The people in those states have more fuel, so to speak, for a successful marketplace for a price for pollution, because there's so much more of it. They're leaving lots of money on the table today (Texas could have an annual $4 billion program at $10/ton). And it's so much better to tax pollution than, say, sales of food or income. 

Another way to look at this chart is how much we're currently subsidizing polluters (at $10/ton to make the math easy) by not charging them anything for their pollution, by state. And another way of saying the same thing is how much more of a tax burden we're putting on families in each of these states because they are forced to make up for the lack of pollution fees that the polluters aren't contributing to the public sector.

It may be perverse, but all this pollution creates a great opportunity for better policy!



0 Comments

Polluters pay - Washington State working on cap-and-trade

12/21/2014

0 Comments

 

Polluters get a free ride now; some states making them pay for their climate mess

In most places, an oil refinery or a massive manufacturing plant that creates tens of thousands of metric tons of carbon pollution doesn't have to pay for that pollution. Since it's free to the company, they keep on spewing out the climate change causing carbon like dumping toxic sludge directly into a sewer: no filters, no caps, no nothing.

Some states are figuring out they ought to charge those companies a fee for their pollution to not only get them to figure out how to pollute less (since now it's getting expensive) but also to pay for other parts of the public sector. The latest initiative is from Washington Governor Jay Inslee - his cap-and-trade proposal would charge 130 or so big companies and generate about a billion dollars a year. 

Washington State could join California which has been charging carbon polluters in a quarterly auction to set the price for years. 

Illinois should do the same thing. If we charged our oil refineries and major manufacturers a fair price for their pollution, we'd not only quit subsidizing our polluters but we'd be able to help pay for the backbone of our low-pollution economy: the CTA and Metra. These trains carry 2 million people every day but the backlog for maintenance is far larger than what we're budgeted to pay for. Makes sense to pay for the maintenance (and expansion) of low-pollution public transportation by finally kicking the polluters off the free ride bus.

If Washington State could generate a billion and we're about twice their size....we might be able to solve our transit funding shortfalls in an elegant policy combination. 
0 Comments

    The Lab

    Ideas and experiments for helpful policies to improve lives

    Archives

    September 2019
    June 2016
    December 2014

    Categories

    All
    Budget
    California
    Cap And Trade
    Cap-and-trade
    Climate
    Crime
    Energy
    Externalities
    Ferguson
    Local Government
    Metrics
    Municipality
    Oil
    Polluters
    Social Work
    Tax
    Transit
    Washington

    RSS Feed