Just last week, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics went to William Nordhaus who in the 1990s stated that climate change may actually not be bad for the U.S. economy. His findings were surprising to many, but hard to argue with because his research was based on the best available science at the time. Since the 1990s, Professor Nordhaus’s models have been continuously adjusted to include data from the most recent scientific findings. In the process, the scales quickly tipped to where the costs clearly outweigh the benefits.
Nordhaus’s winning the Nobel Prize last week coincides with the latest publication from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its most concerning predictions yet. The IPCC report states that warming is occurring faster and that each incremental increase in temperature leads to more severe damages than previously thought.
According to the 91 authors of the report, we are likely to move from the current 1.oC above pre-industrial times to 1.5oC, as soon as 2040. Crossing this threshold is expected to negatively affect agriculture worldwide and cause food shortages we have not seen in modern times. There will be more intense coastal flooding and more frequent and more powerful storms, such as last week’s hurricane Michael, where the devastation of cities and the Tyndall Air Force Base came at enormous cost to families and our government. We also will have more wildfires and record temperatures. This will lead to more parts of the world becoming uninhabitable and cause massive migration. If the 91 top climate scientists sound alarmist, well this is their goal.
The IPCC report is sounding an alarm and calls governments and citizens to act. To avoid the 1.5oC future, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions (from burning coal, oil and natural gas) by 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030 and by 2050 we need to become carbon neutral (either completely stop burning fossil fuels or find ways to capture and store all greenhouse gas emissions).
Reaching these goals is a major, but not impossible challenge. Professor Nordhaus believes that the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to put a price on carbon, by introducing a revenue neutral carbon tax. Guess who agrees with him? Our own Mississippi Republican powerhouse, Trent Lott. Former Senate majority leader Lott co-leads Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD) with former Louisiana Senator John Breaux. AFCD is an educational and advocacy campaign promoting a Carbon Dividends Plan. This plan was originally proposed by James Baker (White House Chief of Staff and United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan) and George Shultz (Former United States Secretary of State, Treasury and Labor) and is supported by major corporations including General Motors, Pepsico, Unilever and big oil companies such as BP, Total and Exxon. Exxon went even further and just recently donated $1 million to AFCD. AFCD’s plan puts a $40 tax per ton of carbon emissions (to start with), and then returns 100 percent of revenues to American households. The fact that the tax revenues become dividends paid to all of us, means that the government does not keep or decide on how to spend any of the money, making it a revenue neutral tax.
Some say that great minds think alike, and we are proud to see former Sen. Lott care deeply about issues that led to Professor Nordhaus receiving this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. Now, we need Mississippi’s current members of congress to follow Mr. Lott’s lead. We must look beyond partisanship and come together as a nation to protect the world from the future predicted by the IPCC report.
Dominika Parry is leader of the Jackson Metro Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Change Lobby.
