Climate watch: Now is the time to act on carbon fee legislation

In the home stretch, Joe Biden leaned hard into the issue of climate change. He gave a televised climate speech and ran climate-focused ads in swing states. His campaign bet that this issue, once considered politically risky, would now be a winner.

That bet paid off. Candidate Biden is now president-elect Biden. But, as is often the case, his party doesn’t have unified control across the whole federal government. That makes “working together” the order of the day.

Encouragingly, Mr. Biden understands that people of any party can and do care about climate change. He has said, “Hurricanes don’t swerve to avoid red states or blue states. Wildfires don’t skip towns that voted a certain way. The impacts of climate change don’t pick and choose. It’s not a partisan phenomenon, and our response should be the same.”

Some Republicans in the Senate are expressing similar opinions. In October, Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, participated in a climate policy webinar with her climate-hawk colleague, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI. She noted that bipartisanship gives a policy longevity, so she said, “Let’s work in a way that is going to get the support that you need from both Republicans and Democrats.”

There is an incredible swell of public demand for climate action. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the number of Americans who are “alarmed” about climate change has more than doubled from 11 percent of in 2015 to 26 percent in 2020. Here in Centre County, 63 percent of our community are concerned about global warming, the Yale research reveals.

Those numbers make sense. This year has made it starkly obvious that climate change is already hurting Americans. More than 5 million acres have burned across Western states this year, displacing thousands of people. The Southeast has been battered by a record-breaking hurricane season, where storm after storm makes landfall before communities can recover from the previous one. We must move quickly to address the root cause of these extreme events: excess greenhouse gas emissions.

One fast-acting, effective climate policy we should enact is a carbon fee. Congress could charge a fee or price on all oil, gas and coal we use based on the greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Putting that price on pollution will steer our country toward cleaner options, slashing our harmful emissions across many areas of our economy at once. The revenue from this type of policy can even be given to Americans on a regular basis — a “carbon cashback,” if you will, that would put money in people’s pockets while we transition to a clean-energy economy.

Carbon fee legislation exists in Congress now, known as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 763). It has support from people and organizations across the political spectrum. In our area, Patton and Ferguson Township supervisors have endorsed this Act. Among local businesses, The RE Farm Café and SpectaclesFYEye back it. So does University Baptist and Brethren Church and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Centre County. State College Borough has endorsed the concept of carbon fee and dividend.

Our community is ready for U.S. Rep. Fred Keller, R-Kreamer, and Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Howard Township, and Pa. Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey to push to make this legislation the law. With the incoming president clearly committed to addressing climate change, and Americans eager for solutions, now is the time to act. Congress should seize the opportunity.