REVENUE NEUTRALITY IS THE BEST SELLING POINT FOPR CONSUMPTION TAXES:

The door to a bipartisan solution has opened a crack. The American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of Big Oil, in March formally endorsed a "carbon price policy"which could range "from a cap-and-trade system to a carbon tax." (In exchange, API wants to "minimize the burden of duplicative regulations.")  Senator Mitt Romney told the Washington Examiner that he is "interested" in the climate proposal from the business-environmental coalition, the Climate Leadership Council, which it describes as a "carbon fee." Last year, his fellow Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who represents oil-rich Alaska, said that a "price on carbon ... should be one of the options on the table for discussion."

There's just one problem. Now that Big Oil wants carbon tax, most Democrats don't. 

Used to be that if you want to establish your progressive bona fides on climate change, you supported a carbon tax, as Senator Bernie Sanders did to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. The way it works now, polluters can emit greenhouse gas for free, even though the climate crisis imposes severe costs on all of society. A tax on greenhouse gas emissions would increase the cost of goods that contribute to global warming, incentivizing the purchase of goods that don't.

But over the last five years, progressives have been distancing themselves from a carbon tax. In 2016, a Washington State carbon tax ballot initiative was opposed by some left-wing groups because it was revenue-neutral and didn't raise revenue for robust investments in green jobs and poverty reduction.

Tweet   @brothersjudd