Can a Border Tax Help Slow a Borderless Crisis?

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The disastrous flooding in Europe last week is another reminder that the climate crisis is no respecter of borders: carbon (and wildfire smoke) floats above them and roaring rivers crash through them. (And not just in Europe—there was also serious flooding in India and Arizona last week, and in China this week, and we will doubtless see it somewhere else next week, simply because hot air amps up the hydrological cycle: more evaporation, more torrential downpour. It is natural to think that we should try to solve the crisis in a similarly borderless way, except that the entities that organize our political lives, nation-states, are defined by borders, and it’s unlikely that this system will wither away in the decade that scientists have given us to halve our emissions.

So borders may have to become part of the solution. They should be porous enough to let climate refugees pass—after all, most such migrants are leaving places that didn’t cause the problem for countries, such as this one, which did. But goods may be another matter. As Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, and other climate activists have pointed out, over the past two decades, member states of the European Union have seen their emissions fall, in large measure, because they have outsourced factory production to other countries, as part of a general push toward cheap labor. Now, as the E.U. unveils a more ambitious plan for cutting carbon, and as the world becomes more protectionist, European leaders are starting to get concerned that, if they enact stronger climate measures, even more production will move to places with lower emissions standards. And so, as the Times explained, they’re considering a “radical, and possibly contentious, proposal” that would “impose tariffs on certain imports from countries with less stringent climate-protection rules.”

Democrats in the U.S. Senate, who are gearing up to pass a major infrastructure bill containing significant climate spending, are starting to have the same fear. It has prompted them to include in the bill a rudimentary call for some form of a “polluter import fee.” Senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, said, “The United States and the E.U. have to think in terms of the leadership that we can provide and the message that we have to send to China and other countries that would take advantage of the high standards that we are going to enact.” It should be noted that, because America hasn’t actually passed any standards yet, there is a slight horse-cart problem here; also, it’s a little rich to see the world’s biggest oil exporter worrying about others pushing carbon across borders. But, if we’re lucky, we’re just at an odd transition moment and, one hopes, all this will start to seem more sensible shortly.

This idea is a version of something that James Hansen, our premier climate scientist, has been suggesting for decades. Writing in the Hill last fall, he called, as he often has, for a fee on carbon, and added that the “most important part” of it would be a “ ‘border adjustment’—a duty on products imported from countries that don’t have an equivalent price on carbon pollution.” Despite the economic utility, the politics of getting such a fee or tax in place remain difficult. (They weren’t helped when a lobbyist for ExxonMobil was caught on video appearing to explain that the oil giant has supported a carbon tax rhetorically because it believes that there’s no way it would pass.) Some form of a “border adjustment” seems more politically possible: the Bernie Sanders and the Donald Trump camps have both got past the free-trade consensus that dominated American political life for a generation or more. (Though that old consensus is still reflected in agencies such as the World Trade Organization, which might find itself called upon to arbitrate disputes over a border tax.)

John Kerry, the U.S. climate czar—whom Joe Biden charged with getting the rest of the world working hard on climate by the time of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow, in November—was reportedly initially worried about carbon tariffs. But, last week, Politico noted that he seems to be softening on some of his areas of concern. And Senate Democrats sound positively insistent—America, Markey said, shouldn’t be “Uncle Sucker” as it starts to get its climate act together. The worst-case scenario: such laws antagonize Asian nations and make international climate coöperation that much harder. The best case: as a Harvard climate expert and former Obama Administration official told the Times, “a carbon border adjustment is most effective if we never have to use it. If we threaten to use it and that means all our trade partners up their game and do a lot more to reduce emissions, then . . . that can be quite important and quite effective.”

Nothing about the world’s delayed response to the climate crisis really makes sense, and, in some ways, it’s depressing to think that economic nationalism is going to assert itself as a tool here—especially because, as Tom Athanasiou, of the activist think tank EcoEquity, has repeatedly pointed out, the rich countries owe the developing world a huge carbon debt. But we seem to be fighting the climate war with the weapons we’re used to, the nation-state being a prime example. And, because unfettered free trade, if only by expanding the size of the global economy, helped get us into this mess, perhaps there’s some poetic justice if restricting that trade can help with the solution.

Passing the Mic

Samantha Montano, who teaches at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, is the author of “Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis,” which will be published next month, by Park Row Books. The book, which draws on her long experience in emergency management, argues that “every disaster you have yet to experience in your lifetime has already begun. The threads of risk are spun out over decades, even centuries, until they crescendo into disaster.” (Our conversation has been edited.)

What should past disasters be telling us about how to handle what’s coming?

We have always had to contend with extreme weather, but the climate crisis dramatically increases the risk we face. Fortunately, we aren’t starting from scratch—there is an extensive body of disaster research that we can draw on. That said, our current approach to emergency management is not perfect. We desperately need comprehensive emergency-management reform to help us effectively and equitably address growing risk across the country.

Arguably the single most important lesson we can draw from our experience is that we need to be proactive rather than reactive. We need to minimize our risk urgently through tactics including updating building codes, preventing development in high-risk areas, funding community-led buyout programs, and addressing inequality. We also need to build the capacity of local emergency-management agencies. Local emergency managers do more than just manage disasters when they happen. They also are responsible for assessing their community’s risk, planning for hazard mitigation and recovery, and preparing their communities to respond and recover. Unfortunately, due to persistent underfunding, many communities only have a part-time, or even volunteer, emergency manager. If we built the capacity of these agencies, they’d be better situated to be proactive.

Rebecca Solnit, in “A Paradise Built in Hell,” argues that local residents often lead the most effective responses to disaster. Are there ways to help empower them to do so more effectively?

Disaster research certainly supports Solnit’s argument. There is a lot we can do in advance of disasters to help empower local communities, including building local emergency-management-agency capacity, involving local organizations in government-preparedness efforts, and supporting locally led initiatives.

Not everything we do needs to go through formal government channels. Although we need systemic change through policy, there are still ways that we, as individuals, can directly support communities that have experienced a disaster. If you are able to donate, it is usually best to give cash to local groups and organizations. These are the groups that are a part of the community and know what survivors need. They are also the groups that will continue to support their communities through the many years, if not decades, of recovery. If you aren’t able to donate, just amplifying the efforts of these small, local organizations can be helpful, as they compete for funding and attention with the big national nonprofits that tend to dominate news coverage.

How do we use these unavoidable moments to build more equity in our society, instead of deepening divisions?

To me, “disaster justice” means preventing disaster from happening where we can and insuring that we have a system in place that responds equitably where we can’t. Our current approach fails to do this, as evidenced by the racial and age disparities in disaster deaths, and in recovery programs and policies that prevent poor communities from being able to recover as quickly or as holistically as wealthy communities.

The experiences of wildfires out West, flooding in the Midwest, sea-level rise on the East Coast, and the perpetual disasters in the Gulf States are more similar than they are different. Building a movement for disaster justice—overlapping in important ways with the climate movement—is critical to building solidarity across communities. History shows us that that is how power is challenged, and how the conditions for disaster reform become possible.

Climate School

Last week, I wrote that the remarkable June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, where temperature records were broken by large margins, was convincing some scientists that their models were missing basic shifts in the planet’s operation. Now European scientists, shaken by the flooding across Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, are calling for, in the words of Julia Slingo, “an international centre to deliver the quantum leap to climate models that capture the fundamental physics that drive extremes.” Until we’ve built such models, she said, “we will continue to underestimate the intensity/frequency of extremes and the increasingly unprecedented nature of them”—or, as a professor emeritus at University College London put it, we will be “in deep, deep shit.”

The veteran reporter David Sirota offers a fairly mind-bending essay on the way that public-pension funds are being used to bankroll billionaires—and to buck up the fossil-fuel industry.

Carbon Tracker and India’s Council on Energy, Environment and Water have a new report on the prospects for developing countries to leapfrog over fossil fuels and straight to renewables: “Given the continued rapid growth rate of solar and wind, it is highly likely that emerging markets,” excluding China, “have already plateaued or reached peak demand for fossil fuels for electricity. China is likely to peak before 2025.”

Harvard’s refusal to divest its endowment from fossil fuels continues to draw scorn from across the country. The Alaskan Kim Heacox, in the Guardian, quotes one of the university’s most illustrious alumni, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.” Meanwhile, a current junior, Ilana Cohen, writes in Newsweek that, in failing to divest, Harvard and other “institutions are consciously breaching their fundamental fiduciary duty.”

The climate desk at the Times ran a long piece about a conflict between the solar-energy industry and local environmental groups: “The divide between those who want more power lines and those calling for a more decentralized energy system has split the renewable energy industry and the environmental movement.” Luckily, in the spring, the quintessential energy-nerd journalist David Roberts produced an even longer essay, explaining why the rapid installation of rooftop solar provides the perfect complement to utility-scale renewables.

Scoreboard

Greenland has ended a fifty-year government policy of searching for oil, and stopped the granting of new permits for exploration. “It is a decision where climate considerations, environmental considerations and economic common sense go hand in hand,” a minister said. “Suspending the current oil strategy is the right choice,” she added—even though, by some estimates, the island may sit on top of many billions of barrels of oil.

Yet another study on the Amazon region—this one of impressive design and duration—shows that it is now emitting more carbon dioxide than it absorbs.

The Pacific Northwest heat wave, among many other things, is melting the glaciers of the Cascades at an unprecedented pace. Scott Pattee, of Washington State’s Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecasting team, told the Independent, “We’ve been losing glaciers a lot lately due to climate change or whatever it is—but to have them go this rapidly is really quite scary.” The before-and-after photographs are pretty amazing.

Warming Up

Check out “Shaking as It Turns,” by the trio Lula Wiles. Folk with some steel.