The Likelihood of Extreme Events is Increasing. Time for a Carbon Tax!

Whew, what a scorcher! I saw reports of 113 degrees in Weaverville, but I estimate a bit of that comes from the hot asphalt absorbing the sun. Our own minuscule urban heat island effect. Overall air temperatures were probably around 111, but that’s still a significant increase from Heat Dome 2021. I can’t help but wonder what bleak record we’ll break next year, or perhaps even this year yet. I hope it’s not drought-related. I hope we get abundant cold precipitation this winter. It’s a fool’s hope, but perhaps we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

            Exponential change and probability. Non-linear relationships. Time seems to speed up as we age, yes? A smaller fraction of our overall lives, whipping by with accelerating haste. Carbon emissions and heating have quickened in an exponential manner, increasing orders of magnitude in geologic leaps and bounds. When we consider the likelihood of climate records being broken year after year, we must envision a normal curve (aka bell curve) with a “fat tail” on the right. The impact of events not yet witnessed and utterly unimaginable in our stable Holocene climate is greater than our previously used statistical models had assumed. Extreme outlier events will become the new “normal”. If you’d like to read a super cerebral article on the topic of climate risks and the social cost of carbon, here’s a link to a paper written by Martin Weitzman of Harvard, Department of Economics: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/fattaileduncertaintyeconomics.pdf. If you would like a simpler explanation, here’s an article explaining Weitzman’s findings in plain speak: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fat-tail-of-climate-change-risk_b_8116264.

            There’s an elegant solution at our fingertips: a carbon tax. I understand everyone hates taxes, but hear me out! It feels ridiculous for us to be discussing plastic straws when celebrities and politicians take trips in personal jets less than an hour’s drive, emitting literal tons of CO2. Call it a carbon tax, a tax on over-consumption, on greed, on excessive wealth, but this tax could be used to invest in a decarbonized electrical grid and in local transportation services. Electric shuttles! Mopeds! Bike share programs! Solutions vary in cost, but these are achievable goals. Ideally the costs would be targeted only toward the people who consume the most, who spend the most money and emit the most carbon, sparing middle class and low-income Americans from having to foot the bill. The benefits would be distributed toward the majority of Americans, combatting the widening wealth gap. If not a tax, call it an insurance policy for Earth: We invest today to prevent continuous catastrophes from unfolding right now into the foreseeable future.

            We still have time to act. The window is closing but there’s still time. We have financial tools to use. We have technologies to scale up and adopt extensively, including carbon capture and sequestration and desalinization. There are cultural practices we can adopt, like working together at every organizational level to mechanically thin and control burn our forests to maximize carbon retention in the era of mega-fires. We have options!

            I often wonder what it will take, what facts I could present, what heartfelt plea I could make that would be powerful enough to tip the scales toward mitigation on a large scale. What emotional connection could I ever make that struck a chord so deep we all decided, simultaneously, to steward this miraculous planet with the shared goal of maximizing life, human and non-human alike, and improving individual and collective well-being?

            I certainly will never know the answer, but it’s helpful to remind myself I’m less than a blink of a blip in deep time and space.

This is the nature of democracy: it moves painfully slowly because everyone gets to speak their piece. It takes years or tens of years to implement policy changes because they must be debated and clarified a thousand times over. All the same, despite the downward trends into ecological collapse, fascist tyranny, and looming civil war, I firmly believe democracy is the best model to maximize freedom and opportunity, and that free speech is the best possible mechanism to drive change.

We will survive this wildfire season, and we will live to thrive another day!