Market-based solutions for defeating a Green New Deal

Here is an update analyzing the subversive uses of market mechanisms by fossil fuel interests. As I wrote about in 2017, the petroleum majors have been exploring faux carbon taxes as a means of undercutting the most important part of California's suite of climate related laws, i.e., non-market mechanisms including restrictive regulatory laws. This tactic of using carbon taxes to dodge mounting litigation and laws fostering an expeditious transition away from fossil fuels is now evolving into a tactic to defeat similarly aggressive versions of a Green New Deal. This may well be a deal that D.C. moderates push to achieve in 2020.

Below is an excerpt from a posting on Naked Capitalism:

 “Big Oil Pushes Corporate-Friendly Carbon Tax in Attempt to Stem Green New Deal Wave” [LittleSis]. “With intensifying demands for bold climate action, the fossil fuel industry and its top allies are lining up behind a corporate-funded, market-centered carbon tax proposal, in an effort to stem the rising momentum around ideas like the Green New Deal and growing shareholder and investor concerns about the climate crisis. Oil and gas powerhouses BP and Shell recently announced that they were each contributing $1 million over the next two years to lobbying efforts for the Baker-Schultz Plan, which proposes an initial tax of $40-per-ton on carbon emissions…. Backed by top global corporate powerhouses, the plan is driven by an industry-friendly logic firmly within the bounds of the neoliberal imagination. For example, under the plan, revenue generated from the carbon tax would be returned back to “taxpayers,” rather than used by the government to oversee an accelerated transition to a system of renewable energy… 
Americans for Carbon Dividends

 (AFCD) is the U.S. lobbying arm for the Baker-Schultz Plan. AFCD appears to be entirely run by the lobbying firm Squire Patton Bogg and several of its top revolving door lobbyists. In addition to the fossil fuel industry ramping up its efforts to promote the Baker-Schultz plan, over a dozen major corporations and corporate-aligned environmental groups just announced a new group, the CEO Climate Dialogue, to promote ‘a market-based solution’ to the climate crisis.”