Articles by Charles Komanoff
Charles Komanoff is the co-founder of the Carbon Tax Center. For more information, click here.
All Articles
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Will carbon cap-and-trade be the next Ponzi scheme?
Even as the tsunami of Bernard Madoff’s busted Ponzi scheme was submerging hapless rentiers around the world, another esoteric financial enterprise quietly took a step forward this week. At a […]
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Advocates launch the Price Carbon Campaign
What do the defeat of the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill, the burst of the oil-price bubble, the Wall Street meltdown, the promise of a new political landscape in the wake of […]
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Hansen’s message to the planet
Maybe it was the thought of two decades of climate-crisis exhortation, little more heeded than words shouted at a hurricane.
Photo: germuska via Flickr.Perhaps it was all three. Whatever the reasons, the climate crisis' Paul Revere turned it up a few more notches in a speech yesterday (PDF) at a Congressional staff briefing in Washington D.C.
Yet James Hansen's headline-grabbing broadside against Big Oil and Big Coal CEOs may prove less significant than his full-throated advocacy of carbon tax-and-dividend as the highest priority for reducing carbon emissions and abating global warming:
A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax.
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National environmental justice coalition blasts cap-and-trade, backs carbon tax
Condemning carbon trading as "fraught with uncertainties, lack[ing] transparency and creat[ing] large opportunities for emitting facilities to engage in fraud," a national coalition of environmental justice organizations has called for a federal carbon tax to address "the most critical issue of our time" -- the climate crisis.
Photo: Brooke Anderson.The June 2 statement from the Climate Justice Leadership Forum is the latest sign of mounting disaffection with the top-down push for carbon cap-and-trade. It is particularly significant because the 28 signatory organizations, which span the country from Anchorage to New Orleans and from Oakland to New York City, have been the spearhead of a rising movement by communities of color to crack open the historically affluent and white U.S. environmental lobby, much of which has backed the cap-and-trade approach to pricing carbon emissions.
Moreover, CJLF's endorsement of "an equitable carbon tax" serves notice that lower-income and "minority" constituencies are concluding that the disproportionate impacts of carbon taxes and other user fees can (and must) be reversed through progressive use of the carbon tax revenues.