About 65% of Washington voters support action on climate change. But after six years of working to pass legislation for a carbon tax, the state has yet to put a price on emissions. How do political divisions make the mission so challenging? What alternative solutions are advocates exploring? And how might the Nori marketplace fit into a broader policy framework?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Paul Gamble and Christophe Jospe in very windy Seattle. It’s blowing around really good. Buildings are shaking. Trees, bushes are...
Paul Gambill: The lights flickered.
Ross Kenyon: The lights flickered. Yeah, I saw that too. I don’t really know what’s going on out there.
Christophe Jospe: It’s been wild. I had a conference call earlier today with someone who called in on her cell phone because power went out in her house.
Unknown speaker: Wow. It’s real, just like climate change. And we’re tenuous links. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Ross failed to say some things that I’m going to say on his behalf now. If you like the podcast, if this is your first time listening, please subscribe. We’re always looking for new guests, new ideas. So if you are one of those people or have Please send it in.
Ross Kenyon: And actually, we were looking at iTunes or on Apple podcast app and we had a bunch of five star reviews, which we’d never noticed. So if that was you out there, thank you very much. It helps quite a bit. Please do that if you have not.
Paul Gambill: And if it wasn’t you, why not?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, why not? Send us a note. Complain about us. Let us know.
Christophe Jospe: So we’re here in the Nori office. Sitting across from us is Kyle Murphy of Carbon Washington. Carbon Wah for the cool kids out there. That’s the hip new way of saying it. Carbon, what are you going to do about it? Yeah. He is the executive director, and we’re very glad to have him. Actually, if you’ve been a longtime listener, we’ve also had Greg Rock of Carbon Washington as well. So hopefully we can reference some of the things he brought up. Kyle, welcome to the show. You’re sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, and we really like to start with everyone’s story.
Specifically, what sort of led to them caring about climate change as an issue that they wanted to work on?
Kyle Murphy: I think snorkeling had a big thing to do with it. I used to snorkel as a kid, and I just was fascinated with fish. So I wanted to say fish. And one thing led to another, and you really can’t. There’s an existential challenge, I think, for anyone working on a single environmental issue. You could do a great job protecting a single habitat or a single species and climate change can just kind of wipe the deck clean on all of that work if we don’t address this larger issue. So that’s how I kind of spiritually came to the issue.
Professionally, I’ve run a lot of campaigns prior to taking over as executive director of this organization. So I was running metro campaigns and had an opportunity to run a carbon tax campaign and it was like a Very challenging dream come true. Which one was it?
Ross Kenyon: Were you back a couple years ago with 732? You’ve been here that long?
Kyle Murphy: Yeah, I was the campaign co-director. I helped set the original campaign up all the way back in 2014 when we were still working on the policy and writing a campaign plan. That was when I got involved.
Ross Kenyon: Great. We’re going to have to go through and make you explain the differences and all that. But I suspect you have a better plan than me launching into that right away.
Christophe Jospe: No, I just want to ask the dumb question. What is a campaign?
Unknown speaker: One of the dumbest questions, I think.
Christophe Jospe: No, see, I actually think in terms of talking about advocacy and wanting to change things and maybe campaign around it and convince people that this is a good thing worth thinking about. But kind of at its core, what does it mean to be a campaigner and to create campaigns?
Kyle Murphy: I think I draw a distinction with kind of a permanent nonprofit or a movement, which might be a multi-decade enduring effort. I kind of think of a campaign as more of a finite bite-sized chunk of something you’re trying to achieve. So in an electoral setting, you might be trying to elect or unelect someone or pass an initiative or defeat an initiative or block a permit or, you know, get one piece of legislation passed. So I think the campaign has a finite Horizon, and then there’s all these strategic components that are underneath it to try to achieve success.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think of it binately, too. I think of Caesar and Gull or something, right? You have like a single season, then you go winter. So you’re saying it’s not a movement that just goes for 80 years. So there’s like a clear goal, and then you’re done.
Kyle Murphy: Yeah, ideally, although I think this is about like year six for me of a quote unquote carbon tax campaign. So it can endure. Yeah, it can keep on going if you’re not clear and deliberate with yourself.
Christophe Jospe: And you’re mobilizing people around campaigns. Maybe it’s the same people. Maybe it’s different people. Carbon Washington has been around long enough to see the idea of putting a price on carbon manifest itself in different ways. Take us from the beginning, kind of how did this get started six years ago? How have you seen it evolve?
Ross Kenyon: How much is George Soros paying you personally?
Kyle Murphy: And how long do we have? This is a four hour podcast, right? Yeah. You know, I think carbon pricing is not a new idea. It’s a very old idea. Like you can go all the way back to like Milton Friedman was like a tax pollution kind of theorist. So the idea has like a long and rich academic history.
Ross Kenyon: You mean like the tax bads, not goods approach?
Kyle Murphy: Exactly. Yeah. Bringing it back to Yeah. I think there was quite a bit of urgency and impatience in the broader grassroots environmental movement in Washington State. A feeling that not only was cap and trade maybe not the best solution or less ideal than a carbon tax, I think there was just a feeling that we need to put this issue on the front burner. We’re introducing bills and getting nowhere and getting nowhere and getting nowhere. And you can’t keep trying the same thing again and again and expecting to do better. So we had an idea for what we thought at the time was a pretty radically different political approach, but a very sound economic approach for revenue neutralization.
We had thousands of grassroots volunteers that muscled that initiative on the ballot in 2016.
Christophe Jospe: I want to hear about the food fight.
Ross Kenyon: Or should we maybe set the stage too of what just happened? So the revenue neutral carbon tax or carbon fee, that failed. And then we just recently had another policy that didn’t happen, but it was different paradigmatically. It was a different approach.
Kyle Murphy: That’s correct. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to send you the softballs, man. You got to hit them.
Kyle Murphy: I know. I just bunted. You’re out. Okay. Boy, I’m having flashbacks to fifth grade again. So there’s still a competition of ideas. And it’s been a challenging, I think, thing to work at the front edge of climate policy in Washington, but then multiple times to fall short from actually enacting it. The positive side of that is that we’re learning lessons here that apply around the country and we’re trying things that are working in some ways and not other ways. So the revenue neutral approach in 2016, it didn’t pass. I think it did do a good job of putting the issue on the front burner, which was the original goal, but it would have been great if we could have gotten it over the 50% mark.
Ross Kenyon: When you say revenue neutral, I’m sorry, we should define this too. You just mean taxes aren’t being raised. It ultimately leads to the same amount of taxes as before.
Kyle Murphy: Exactly. And there’s academic conservatives and academic liberals that really appreciate that approach because you can cut carbon without increasing the scope and size of government and you can do so also without disadvantaging middle class families financially because you can cut other taxes they pay so that at the end of each month when they’re balancing their books they’re maybe like roughly the same place. It’s a way to do ambitious carbon pricing without increasing regressive taxes. So it has ups and downs, but you forego an opportunity to do major public investments in green infrastructure and that sparked a big debate in 2016 and a carbon tax approach this year that would have, instead of doing tax rebates, done kind of a major public investment in carbon reducing projects was put forward.
It also failed, but we learned some interesting things from it and it kept the issue on the front burner.
Ross Kenyon: What’s important is the friends you made along the way.
Kyle Murphy: Yeah. You know, I admire everyone. I think includes you three who dedicates their life to this incredibly important issue, even if we don’t always agree. I think we always have to keep that in mind.
Ross Kenyon: We’d be terribly bored if we all agreed all the time, even internally. Like part of the fun is that we have people who like challenging their intellect with different ideas, too. And one of the things that I’ve appreciated with Carbon Wah, I’m one of the cool kids. I can I’m allowed to use that. Is that 1631, which failed this year, was not revenue neutral. It was a tax increase. So the left here tended to like that more, paid for more social programs, but the right was maybe a little more concerned about it.
And then it was flipped earlier. But you seemingly like either of those approaches. I think the carbon tax or the carbon fee is so important to carbon law that the other appendages or lack thereof was less important than just getting a fee placed. Is that a fair summation of how you approach this?
Kyle Murphy: I’m sure that if my communications person listens to this, they won’t like that I said this. But internally, we often like to say if someone dug a big hole and burned all the money in it, but they got the money from a carbon tax, we would support that idea. So it’s not to say that accountability and efficiency and fairness aren’t important because they’re super important. But we don’t want to pass up an opportunity to try to get carbon pricing done.
Christophe Jospe: So just for the sake of clarity, and maybe this won’t clarify, but you’ve said carbon pricing, carbon fee, and carbon tax. Is there any difference between those three words?
Kyle Murphy: A real challenge we have is how to communicate this idea clearly. No, there’s not really a difference. There’s a useful difference, I think, when California has a cap-and-trade system. British Columbia has a carbon tax. We’ve been mostly talking about carbon tax or carbon fee. The carbon tax or the carbon fee, as was explained, is just a levy per dollar amount of CO2 burned into the atmosphere. A cap-and-trade system is actually an auction system. Where major carbon emitters go to an auction and they buy permits and then they trade the permits with each other.
And those permits cost money, which then is kind of a back doorway to increase the price of carbon emissions. So they all result in a price on carbon emissions, but there’s kind of a more direct route or kind of the auction route.
Christophe Jospe: Got it. So I want to go back to the food fight. So we’ve got different constituencies, different stakeholders that you have on different teams hurling tomatoes at each other, and you’re attracting them to different camps with, I imagine, carrots that they’re going to throw across.
Ross Kenyon: Just riding this one out. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I haven’t gotten to mangle metaphors for a while.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’ve been well-behaved. You’ve earned it. Go for it. So there’s carrots and there’s tomatoes.
Christophe Jospe: There’s carrots, tomatoes, pizza. Yeah. Different things that you just want to throw at each other. But what’s interesting, I think, is you have people who might not necessarily see eye to eye coming together around a campaign and saying, hey, we support this for this reason. So I’m wondering, you have this positioning as a nonprofit. Pass.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, you weren’t able to pull it off. That’s the thing. You’ve learned things, but this is a hard thing to get past.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, so it’s like you’ve been in the trenches with them now, and so you know something about what they care about.
Kyle Murphy: So there’s multiple layers at play, and I’ll try to briefly touch on them, and then we can dig into some more if you want. There’s just this fundamental difference between the conservative interests and many more progressive stakeholders around use of revenue. Increasing government revenue is just the antithesis of much of conservative ideology. And so if you’re trying to reach out to a subsection of conservatives to engage on the climate issue, Yet you’re also trying to involve a compromise with progressive stakeholders that are really interested in a revenue investment package. There’s kind of a zero something there that is really, really difficult to achieve.
So that’s kind of an enduring and long-term challenge I think we have. There’s another layer I think that all political movements face that stakeholders aren’t interested in compromising until they believe that they can’t get 100% of everything they want. So trying to get to a place where there’s enough critical mass of folks who are kind of willing to say, okay, I’m now convinced I can’t get everything I want. So now I’m willing to talk about getting some of the things I want in exchange for some of the things you want.
That very like basic political give and take has like really not been happening very much. And we are trying to encourage it to happen and trying to convene people and ask them to compromise and encourage them to do so and convince them that they’re probably not going to get everything they want. That energy produced Producers probably are not going to get to pollute for free indefinitely because we won’t let them do that. And maybe some progressive stakeholders maybe aren’t going to get as much funding right now for some really important projects.
But if we all engage, maybe we can get something in that direction.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been concerned or watching this have been a bit befuddled because some of the rhetoric that surrounds climate change from the left is that this is a huge calamity that is barreling right towards us. So to block action on climate change because there wasn’t funding for social programs attached to it.
Kyle Murphy: You would make a great member of Carbanois. Yeah, I mean our basic argument all along has been let’s take action now and ideally do it in a bipartisan way so that it can be a model for the rest of the country because the rest of the country is not quite as blue as Seattle and Puget Sound and so not taking those interests into account means we probably won’t have done something that can be spread in places like Colorado and Virginia and then ideally like Washington DC. Saying that climate change is an emergency, it’s an emergency, it’s an emergency.
And then saying, actually, you know, that initiative is not quite right. And actually, you know, that bill in the legislature is not good enough. Yeah, it was a very challenging communications operation for some of the other nonprofits involved.
Paul Gambill: I was just going to throw in, there’s a really great article that Dave Roberts wrote for Vox that was, I think it was called The Left Versus the Carbon Tax.
Unknown speaker: I read that one.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, that does a good job chronicling like kind of the history of 732. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: But then you’ve changed tack, though. So 1631, which happened this election cycle, failed, but it raised something like, was it $2 billion a year, I believe, was through the projected amounts raised, something like that. But it failed, too, despite Democrats increasing their concentration in the legislature in Washington. This is something Todd Meyer said on our last podcast.
Unknown speaker: Wait, say that again?
Ross Kenyon: The carbon fee failed, 1631 failed, but Democrats also picked up seats in the legislature. In Washington.
Unknown speaker: That’s true. Okay, yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So there’s something that’s interesting. It wasn’t just right-wing interests who voted it down. In some ways, there was some maybe Democrats also don’t like it. I don’t know what happened. Maybe you could explain it to me.
Paul Gambill: There was a lot of that. There was also a lot of opposition from the agricultural industry in Washington because this was a pretty regressive tax on their fuels.
Kyle Murphy: Yeah. One of the things we spent this election on was focusing on a number of important legislative races and in a bipartisan way trying to elect climate champions. And we were very successful in that project. And in the places where we elected Democrats or we campaigned for progressive Republicans on environmental issues, the initiative did not do well. It got thumped, frankly. Well, so why was that? Some section of Democrats were voting for general environmental values and choosing not to vote for the initiative. We don’t really know exactly why that was.
You can speculate that it’s tax aversion, that even on the Democratic side, There is not an enthusiasm to increase their gas prices without some kind of mechanism to help them out. I think the campaign theorizes that the oil industry did spend a lot of money against this and we’re spreading around kind of an argument that the initiative wouldn’t be accountable or effective. And I think that might have played into it also. And there were things the initiative could have done in the design process to have been a little bit more protected against that argument that they didn’t.
And when you compare it to 732, which was deliberately designed to be transparent and accountable and to reach some of those conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans, you do see a little bit of a gap where, in eastern Washington, the Revenue Neutral Initiative did 5 or 10 points better. But then in the Puget Sound area, it did, in some places, like 5 points worse, or in Seattle, like 8 points worse. So you actually did have... You had some vote trading, and then you kind of ended up at roughly similar levels, like 41 versus 43.
It’s a fascinating dynamic.
Ross Kenyon: So what do we do? I don’t envy you sitting in that chair over there. It sounds like you’ve tried both sides and it just backfired a little bit. Where should you go?
Kyle Murphy: I think that we’ve tried two versions of a similar policy construct, a carbon price, that have proven to be very challenging to do on the ballot. I wouldn’t rule out doing another one, but I don’t think it’s very easy to pass one with a great deal of opposition because the public has demonstrated to us that there is an inherent skepticism to this design that would have to be overcome. What is interesting though is after both initiatives, there’s been some exit polling done afterwards to try to like, right after people vote, you know, a poll is done to try to figure out why did you vote this way and what is your attitude towards, you know, a certain issue.
And on climate change, 65 or something percent of people in Washington want the state to take action. So they are kind of saying, not that, but do something. If you ask people if they would support a carbon tax, in theory, over 50% consistently say, yeah, I would for green energy or for tax rebates. And this has not gone down over time between 2016 and 2018. So there’s kind of an enduring conceptual support. But it’s been really hard to get people to choose the exact policy. So that kind of suggests to me that if the legislature passed a carbon price and it started to work and deliver either clear benefits in the form of projects or tax rebates that people got, the public might and probably would accept it because there is general support.
They just have voted down the specific principles. It also suggests a need to explore... Other solutions in the interim that are not directly related to carbon pricing. Maybe that’s a regulation that bans coal plants or restricts natural gas electricity or that restricts the carbon intensity of fuels. And the beauty of the Regulatory discussion is that those regulatory ideas I just suggested tend to be even more popular with the public and even less flexible to businesses. So one of the things like we like to take to energy companies or businesses when we talk to them about climate change is the idea that a Really, a carbon price gives them maximum flexibility, but if they’d rather have the government ordering them to shut down certain units of their electricity supply or to shut down how much goods they can transport how frequently, then that is the other idea on the table.
Paul Gambill: One of our co-founders, I’ve brought this up so many times on the podcast, and we’ve had Alden Donnelly on the podcast to talk about this also. From her analysis of various different efforts to remove pollutants, going back to the She’s found that in no cases did pollutant tax work at getting the pollutant out. Every single time it worked, it was because of a regulation. So getting lead out of gasoline, dealing with the acid rain problem, dealing with CFCs and the ozone hole. And so what she has said she would advocate for would be something like going to industry and saying, you have to reduce the amount of carbon in your precursor content that you’re selling by, I don’t know, pick a number, 5% every year for the next so many years.
And then let them figure it out. And then also give them the option that, or you could remove carbon from the atmosphere. And then that leaves it up to them to figure out how to innovate around that, how to come up with their own solutions without government picking winners and losers per se. And the interesting case is looking at lead and gasoline because... The United States and Canada took that approach, and meanwhile, Europe took the taxation approach, and we got let out of gasoline decades before Europe did. And Europe only finally did in the 2000s because they finally switched to a regulation.
The last thing that you were saying is that’s another approach. I’m curious, do you think there’s appetite for something like that in the Washington legislature?
Kyle Murphy: Kind of a pet peeve I have on kind of political. People will ask me, like, what is the political reality for climate action this year? And I think it’s not a fixed thing you talk about. It’s a construction that can be shifted and moved. So our kind of enduring project is trying Try to expand what there is appetite for. I think that there is absolutely appetite to do some small things on climate change this session, whether that would be kind of a narrow regulatory approach on one facet of the problem.
There’s a bill introduced to ban HFCs, which are part of the solution to the ozone problem, but are creating...
Ross Kenyon: This is from refrigerants, right?
Kyle Murphy: Exactly.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Hydrofluorocarbons. There we go. And the C is that chlorofluorocarbon.
Kyle Murphy: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Our house pet ants here helping us out. I started it. It’s okay.
Kyle Murphy: So I think you can look at something like that where those HFCs are kind of super greenhouse gases. And we do have alternatives to using them. So it’s really just about ordering the switch. And I think that’s a regulation that’s going to be on the table this session. That’s a great idea. There’s a regulation for a low carbon fuel standard that we worked on a little bit last year and supported that would... Essentially order the petroleum companies to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuel supply and then give them a few different options for how they might do that.
I think we’ll see those bills move, but it’s going to be up to organizations like Carbon Wah and people listening on this podcast to engage to expand the political reality such that they can get done.
Christophe Jospe: Very diplomatic answer. I want to go back to something that you brought up earlier about wanting to pass legislation here in Washington state that could be replicated in other states. And I think it brings up a really important concept when it comes to carbon pricing. Which is the concept of carbon leakage. So I want to put you on the spot to define carbon leakage and also tell us why does that matter when you’re looking at carbon trading state to state and then on a federal level and then even on a global level.
Kyle Murphy: Sure. Carbon leakage is a real problem, but it’s also one of the favorite boogeymen of climate action skeptics. Anyway, on to defining it. Carbon leakage is the idea that if you start charging a certain industry, So your carbon emissions are leaking into other jurisdictions. They’re not actually decreasing. So to try to deal with that, there’s various ideas on the table. One is that you should give a specific tax rebate to your potentially leaky businesses so that they will pay more for their energy, but they could get a tax rebate on the back end of it to keep their overall costs roughly the same.
Another is to exempt them from the regime and ask them to do something else to reduce carbon. And one of the very fun discussions we have in the legislature sometimes is trying to figure out who exactly should qualify for protection against leakage and who shouldn’t. And if you go around Olympia and you ask different business lobbyists to raise their hand if they think that they need protection, you get every single hand up. And then if you do some academic research, it’s a little bit of a smaller group, but...
Paul Gambill: How often does the idea of putting together a more regional program come up so that if you had a bunch of neighboring states, maybe even Canadian provinces or that sort of thing, all agreeing on this, then it’s much more difficult for someone to just move across the border?
Kyle Murphy: I think one challenge is that states like Idaho and Wyoming have a reduced amount of enthusiasm to try to create a climate regime right now. But to your question, I think that was the original.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe stop saying climate regime. It sounds like Kim Jong-il or something. It sounds spooky.
Kyle Murphy: Is that not a good climate regime?
Christophe Jospe: It sounds like the KGB is going to kick down your door with the Stasi. Oh, I took it in a different way. I thought it was like, what’s the diet that I should take in order to be a better climate denizen?
Ross Kenyon: I’ve read too many books, I think.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Kyle Murphy: I think that the original vision for the West Coast was to create a unified multi-state cap and trade system between California, Oregon, and Washington. And there’s some real advantages to that, especially if you have kind of permit trading, you can get kind of unique systems so that a business in Oregon that is doing a really awesome job reducing carbon could kind of sell their excess reduction to a company in Washington that’s not doing as well. But that, for a whole bunch of reasons, has been extremely challenging to actually get in place.
So it looks like Oregon may be getting close to passing a cap and trade system in the coming years or maybe the coming session.
Paul Gambill: I think that the big problem there was that California wanted to double count everything. They wanted to be able to count everything against their own emissions targets. And the other states were like, what? No, we’re not. We want to count these against our emissions targets too.
Kyle Murphy: I understand that was a sticking point as well as just the basic political will absent that was not fully developed at the time when those negotiations were happening. And I think looking at those kinds of issues was exactly why so many of us were much more excited about a carbon tax because there isn’t permit hiding and trading and counting and there’s no grandfathering in. That word just still sends chills up my spine when we’re talking about climate policy. So... And the regional approach is a great dream. I think the vision that we have is probably more along the lines of Washington, maybe Oregon, maybe Colorado, maybe other states will do some version of a carbon price or climate policies that inspires national action as opposed to trying to replicate kind of a three or four or five state approach.
Paul Gambill: Is there something to be learned from the marijuana and gay marriage campaigns over the last decade?
Kyle Murphy: That’s a good, that’s a really good question. I think, you know, those are examples that progressive campaigners love to dig into because they’re really great successes and the change happened much quicker than any of us thought they thought it would. When they try to draw a straight parallel is that while their economic implications to both of those initiatives and those efforts, gay marriage and marijuana legalization, they weren’t primarily economic shifts in the way that climate policy has to be. And so because we’re trying to change our entire energy system, I think some of the lead and gasoline examples you brought up are interesting and it’s extremely...
Morally problematic to try to paint comparisons between climate change and our history of racism. But the way that slavery impacted the whole country’s economy and then trying to end that practice is an interesting one for, I think, climate policy advocates to keep in mind just in terms of the scale of the challenge not to draw moral equivalents because that’s extremely messy and unfair to do, I think.
Paul Gambill: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that sort of comparison before, but that makes some sense to me.
Christophe Jospe: And I kind of understand the moral equivalence. I mean, on your website, I think you frame climate change as a moral issue. So there is the moral framing. Ross, you had a question there.
Ross Kenyon: I did. I was going to take it a different direction, but if you had more comments, I don’t want to stop you. Okay. With the rate that renewables have been going down in cost, if we were not able to have either a state or a federal carbon tax fee or some way of managing carbon content in the energy sector and economy generally, how fast would this just solve itself and we would stop emitting totally, do you think? Yeah.
Kyle Murphy: Oh, I have no idea. No, but it’s a good question because I think to the extent we’re having success, a lot of it is just happening in clean energy development and the way prices are declining. There continues to be a challenge with clean energy storage that I’m sure you’ve had people on that know a lot more about than I do. So that’s a breakthrough we still need to achieve until we have that breakthrough. I think it’ll be quite a while before utilities can be completely off of natural gas and completely carbon free.
And that doesn’t even begin to address issues with transportation and industrial productions. So I think electricity production is within reach. I think we’ll see bills this legislative session that try to get to 100% fossil fuel-free electricity by 2045 or 2040, which is still quite a ways out there, maybe a little further than we need. But I think that’s because folks are still wondering about the last piece of storage and how much that might cost.
Christophe Jospe: So you’re a policy wonk who probably pays attention to proclamations that people make, maybe much like the one you just said, or different mayors make commitments and they don’t always follow through on them. So how do you see your organization keeping people accountable, if at all?
Kyle Murphy: I’m so glad you asked this. I think it’s a real challenge for any advocacy NGO or nonprofit to manage their relationships with elected leaders such that you have good relationships, you can push issues forward together, but that you also mind your important and distinct roles. Someone recently framed it to me as a reminder that access to power is not the same thing as power. One way we’ve tried to orient ourselves is as distinctly independent from either political party, but working with both of them. And I think that’s a little bit unique and it’s challenging, but unique in the climate space and that you have a very pretty strong alignment within the Democratic Party and the climate groups where they’re really kind of working hand in hand on a lot of projects.
And oftentimes that’s a really effective way to move things forward, but it can also... Blur the lines when our political leaders might have an expedient choice that is not a good climate choice and then the climate groups that are supposed to hold them accountable don’t speak up because they have a separate project they’re working on together and they don’t want to upset their friends and you can kind of get kind of a cozy thing going on there. So we have tried really hard to remain independent. And in terms of how we do that, we do independent research.
We publish things that we think are good ideas or bad ideas. We tend to not oppose projects because we have limited bandwidth as an organization. We’re more about advancing positive solutions than being against things. And there’s other groups that are doing good work on that front. But to close this off with a concrete example, we caught a lot of pushback for endorsing two Republicans for a state Senate this last election cycle because people thought that we should be endorsing the Democrat. We stuck by those Republicans just because of the honest truth that they had really leaned in on climate issues and they had...
Gone out of their own comfort zone within their party and taken a lot of flack and they delivered a handful of important votes and they’re prepared to deliver more votes. So we stuck by them and we endured a little bit of flack. And then on the other hand, we worked really hard to elect some Democrats who pushed out Republican climate deniers. We tried to make clear that there’s now an expectation from those Democrats that they need to deliver. And I think some of them are lining up to introduce bills. I think we might see a carbon fee and dividend bill this year, which would be a new idea.
And we can talk about that if you want. Anyway, I’ve rambled enough along this answer.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot of delicious bait in there. I did want to ask you about how rebates or I’ve heard a phrase as a citizen’s dividend, like they have in Norway or Alaska has something kind of similar, but for oil concessions or something like that. What does it look like for a policy that would tax people and then refund them in some sort of way? Is that what this dividend is?
Kyle Murphy: Yeah, good question. I think the kind of beautiful economist’s favorite PhD dissertation would probably have a carbon tax that cuts other taxes instead of a dividend because by cutting other taxes, you can reduce the drag on the economy of those taxes. Like in Washington State, we have a sales tax.
Ross Kenyon: Dude, B&O is not good. Yeah.
Kyle Murphy: I would like to see that gone. We agree, I think. You probably can’t afford to eliminate the whole B&O tax and may not want to, but looking at that should be on the table. But in drawing a distinction to a dividend, a dividend, instead of cutting other taxes, you would put the money in a separate fund and then mail people checks at the end of the year. So not unlike a federal tax rebate. That has the advantage of being really clear and tangible and easy to explain to the electorate and to the public who maybe doesn’t understand the B&O tax or doesn’t really notice the sales tax because it’s usually just a dollar here and nickels there.
People may remember that $200 check. It also helps you balance out the total revenue of the program so you don’t accidentally cut too many taxes on the back end. And there’s interesting federal momentum on this kind of dividend paired with carbon fee idea. There’s a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives that is just getting going. And Jeff Flake and Chris Coons just introduced one in the U. S. Senate on the bipartisan basis a couple days ago.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I understand this also being a Milton Friedman thing with withholding for your taxes, where if you have to pay it at like every quarter at the end of the year, you feel that big check coming out of your account. Whereas if you just pay gradually over the year and then you get a return, people are like free money. Sweet. It’s a huge PR reframe that is quite useful. And you think psychologically, it’s just better for people to have it that way. It’s more appealing.
Kyle Murphy: This would be an ongoing experiment, but I think as a campaigner, it would be easier to sell that idea to folks to say you’re going to get that $100, $200 check. And there might be a little bit of skepticism at first, but I think once they have that check, it adds to the durability of the program because if someone wants to go overturn it, it also means they’re going to take away your check at the end of the year. And so you kind of create some durability there that’s hard for future administrations to try to pull apart.
Christophe Jospe: So that bill you’re referring to is the Energy Innovation Act, correct?
Kyle Murphy: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: And if it passes, are you out of a job?
Kyle Murphy: I would love for that to pass, and I would happily take some kind of other job, preferably with more money than working in an environmental nonprofit.
Ross Kenyon: You should lobby for some protection from leakage of your job.
Kyle Murphy: Okay. You know, that should be in. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to turn the tables a little bit. Nori has its own carbon pricing mechanism, and I’d be interested in your feedback. I mean, we have a Nori token, which will fluctuate in price and pay for one carbon removal certificate, which represents the And while we’re very much not waiting for policy, we’re just saying, let’s build the thing because we think there are people who want to pay for this and there are people who can do this. And we think we have a way to make it easy and trustable and it all kind of works.
Now, how does that fit into, let’s say we get it right. And let’s say that we want to fit into this broader policy framework or objectives that people have going on. How do you see this all coming together?
Kyle Murphy: One little clause that has shown up in many of the carbon tax bills we’ve worked on is permission to allow companies or carbon tax payers to claim a credit against their taxes for any qualified carbon sequestration they have enacted. And there’s some debate around what does qualified mean and who counts? And that would probably go through a very long rulemaking agency process to ensure that it would fit in. So I can imagine in my head some kind of future linkage there where you could even enact a carbon tax, but many people aren’t directly paying it because they’re off on the side doing potentially cheaper.
Am I just pitching your business now?
Christophe Jospe: No, I was trying to put words in your mouth and I didn’t have to. You basically said it. And what I think is really interesting because we’re talking about... Supporting people who are practicing regenerative agriculture. And you see agriculture as big rate payers of utility bills. So utilities, which might be paying the tax, could also have the option to say, no, you know what, we’re paying directly our rate payers who will make more profitable. And it’s still this kind of everyone wins because we’re reducing the total amount of carbon going into the atmosphere.
What did Todd Meyer say about this? We didn’t do the same. Let’s pitch him on Nori on the air. So, okay. I cannot confirm her.
Ross Kenyon: I think he likes it in general that we’re trying to make sure that we can grow the economy at the same time as we address climate change. I think that’s an appealing approach to someone like him.
Kyle Murphy: An interesting thing that I’ve heard. Multiple conservative thinkers on this issue, including Todd, bring up is that we shouldn’t be making the more expensive carbon reducing investments. We should just go straight for the cheapest ones. And so that’s kind of what Nori provides a little bit of an opportunity for is to create a little bit of a marketplace where... It actually might be cheaper to pay someone to reduce carbon somewhere else and then to continue using carbon on site for a little while. That may be a more optimal outcome. There becomes complicated questions of then fairness and justice too for people live right next to that site.
And if there’s not an actual reduction there, they’re not getting the benefit that maybe they deserve. So that’s a debate we hear about too that You mean from like air pollution? Yeah. So, I mean, there’s exactly.
Ross Kenyon: Like those facilities are located in lower income areas.
Kyle Murphy: Exactly, yeah. There’s pushback, I think. I can just repeat what I have heard, but there’s some concern sometimes around systems where you might let a refinery continue to emit, and the carbon they’re emitting also comes with, is combined with local air pollutants. And then that refinery can do other activities somewhere else to reduce their carbon emissions that might be cheaper. So we have this economically Kind of optimal outcome that is has not kind of fixed socially in optimal outcome and a question of fairness. So I think it’s just it’s an interesting one to keep in mind.
And I’m curious if that’s something that Nori thinks about or how do you distribute your projects such that they also consider issues of fairness?
Paul Gambill: It’s something that we’re starting to think about. Impact, like that use of the land, like what was the land before they started participating in carbon sequestration? Were they already growing crops? Did they clear cut trees to do that? These are questions that we don’t have answers for yet. That’s part of the reason why we are putting together a peer review committee of soil scientists and others from respected universities around the country and around the world to help give us input on that and help us make these sorts of decisions because the details on this do matter.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And we’ve read a fair amount of, it often comes from the left, but criticism of offset projects operating in ways that indigenous people might live on the land that is being used as offsets, but they don’t have title to the land. So like Latifundia, like owner, like, oh, Like a large landowner ends up just expropriating them and getting paid to do so. And you’re like, I don’t want Norway to be a part of anything that is even close to that, even like the smallest bit. So, I mean, this is like global and distant in the future, but we even have questions in the United States too about like if someone clear cut land and then turn it into a farm.
You don’t want to reward that. But what if they did it five years ago? I don’t know. 10 years ago? I don’t know. What if you inherited it from your father and he did that? Then maybe it’s okay. I don’t know. We haven’t figured it out yet.
Kyle Murphy: So just to be clear, you’re in support of cutting down the rainforest to plant palm oil, which we can then blend into ethanol fuels.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Kyle Murphy: In the orangutans and yeah. Just toss it all in.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t want to be accused of all the things that I’ve been reading about and scoffing about being like, oh man, these people, they haven’t figured it out yet. There’s a better way to do this. And that irony would just kill all enthusiasm for it.
Christophe Jospe: The short answer is no, Kyle. Any muckraker that is going back through years from now and listening to this podcast and trying to pick and choose their words, I think...
Unknown speaker: Just cut that one clip.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, no, cut that clip. No, but what’s really important, and I think one of Nori’s ingredients of the secret sauce is that we’re open and transparent and public... Yeah. And correct course accordingly, I think, at least is the way forward. How exactly? That’s not necessarily clear. This has been a great podcast. For our listeners who maybe don’t know about Carbon Wah, how can they get How can we get involved? Any final words that you want to tell us about?
Kyle Murphy: I think what you’re doing is fantastic. I think this problem is so challenging, and our solutions are not going to be perfect, and the standard for them should not be perfectionist. Standard should be, are we making the world better? And I’m convinced that the work Carbon Waugh is doing is. I’m convinced that the work you’re doing is making the world better. And for folks who want to learn more about Carbon Waugh, our website is carbonwaugh.org. It’s just carbon, W-A. We’ll be doing lobby days. We will be putting media stories out.
We will be expanding, you know, what is politically realistic. There’s air quotes there. Yes, I know. Apparently on a podcast, they can’t see my air quotes. I’ve been doing hand gestures a lot. Limit as a technology.
Paul Gambill: I have to do it so quickly that the mic picks up the whoosh of the air. It’s like Predator could hear it.
Kyle Murphy: So yeah, thank you so much for having me on and for doing this podcast. I think it’s contributing a lot to the knowledge base on the issue. And so keep up the good work.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. And I want to bestow a compliment that I’m impressed that you’re willing to work across the aisle. It’s something that has been sadly lacking. We try to take everyone seriously and have conversations and find that common ground, especially if you think climate change is as important as everyone at this table thinks it is, then we need to be thinking about it in ways that show people an upside, that don’t alienate people immediately and turn them off. And I think the way that you’re going about that...
Christophe Jospe: So I just want to put out a challenge to all our listeners. Go find someone that doesn’t agree with you and talk through that issue with them and understand their premise. I think the world would be a better place for it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we try to challenge people to that. I got this idea from Brian Kaplan called the Ideological Turing Test. And a Turing test is if a computer, you can’t tell if it’s a computer when you interact with it. And you should be able to do the same thing ideologically. So if you’re right of center, you should be able Okay. Sorry that I got baited into doing that. But thank you for being here. That was a fun one.
