The Carbon Taxes We’re Already Paying
Guest Blog by Mark Schapiro, author of Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of a Disrupted Global Economy
In June, a decades-long open secret hit the media like a typhoon: Climate change is the fundamental economic challenge of our time.
The bipartisan troika of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge fund mogul Tom Steyer and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson funded the report, titled "Risky Business," which estimated that on its current trajectory, climate change could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by 2050. President Obama cautioned environmental leaders at a League of Conservation Voters dinner to prepare the American public for the costs ahead from re-engineering the energy grid away from fossil fuels.
These assertions, as welcome as they are, leave out a fundamental question: When energy gets more expensive, who pays?
The fact is that American taxpayers are paying for the costs of climate change now. These costs don't hit us all at once but sporadically, in different places and at different times. They don't feel like a carbon tax, though they amount to one. Every time we use fossil fuels, we increase our tax burden, a burden that unfolds like a sequence of trap doors, just like climate change itself.
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Mark Schapiro is the author of Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of a Disrupted Global Economy, to be published next month.
