The Enormous Promise of a Carbon Tax-and-Dividend

The group, called Oregon Climate, is pushing a concept called “tax and dividend”: instead of sending the proceeds into government coffers, all of the revenue collected from wholesale fossil-fuel transactions -- gasoline to a distributor, coal to a power plant, and so on -- would be pooled and divided evenly among Oregonians in the form of checks worth an estimated $500 to $1500 per year.

“This is the most climate-friendly progressive legislature that we’ve had, and maybe the most climate-friendly in the country right now,” Oregon Climate Executive Director Camila Thorndike said in an interview Tuesday. “States across the country have their eyes on Oregon, and we cannot let this opportunity pass by.”

Prices would rise in Oregon for concrete, gasoline, electricity and other fossil-fuel-intensive products. Dan Golden, Oregon Climate’s volunteer policy director, said Tuesday that their proposed tax of $30 per ton of carbon (increasing by $10 each year) would translate into about 27 cents per gallon of gasoline, increasing another 9 cents each year.

However, those additional costs would be offset by the checks Oregonians would receive. Oregonians with smaller-than-average carbon footprints would come out ahead, while those with larger-than-average emissions would lose — giving everyone continued incentives to cut their energy consumption.

“I’m not a transportation expert but I think if I were, I’d be really stoked about carbon pricing,” Thorndike said. “Rather than bundles of piecemeal decision-making, you’d have an economywide transition to walkable, bikeable, livable cities. … We’d have so many incentives backed financially to really build our lives and our economy around alternatives to cheap gas.”