Caveat Venditor: Armed with Companies' Climate Scores, Consumers Wield Influence

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies whose famous 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate was heralded as one of the first warnings of global warming, writes, "My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true."[2]

"There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time," he writes. "We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100?percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution."

His solution is a good one, as putting a price on carbon is something that affects the almighty corporate bottom line, but if the fee is implemented as a carbon tax, it may not work, particularly if fossil fuel companies are still getting governmental subsidies. A 2003 study by Annegrete Bruvoll and Bodil Merethe Larsen of Statistics Norway found that even though Norway has among world's highest carbon taxes, the policy only amounted to a 2.3 percent reduction in emissions, while "the most important reduction factors are more efficient use of energy and a substitution towards less carbon intensive energy," factors that contributed a 14 percent reduction in CO2 emissions over the same period.[3]

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Reynard is a Justmeans staff writer for Sustainable Finance and Corporate Social Responsibility. A former media executive with 15 years experience in the private and non-profit sectors, Reynard is the co-founder of MomenTech, a New York-based experimental production studio that explores transnational progressivism, neo-nomadism, post-humanism and futurism. He is also author of the blog 13.7 Billion Years, covering cosmology, biodiversity, animal welfare, conservation and ethical consumption. He is currently developing the Underground Desert Living Unit (UDLU), a sustainable single-family dwelling envisioned as a potential adaptation response to the future loss of human habitat due to the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Reynard is also a contributing author of "Biomes and Ecosystems," a comprehensive reference encyclopedia of the Earth's key biological and geographic classifications, to be published by Salem Press in 2013.