By Rich Heidorn Jr.
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) have joined a new organization to build political support for the carbon dividend proposal offered last year by Republican party elders James A. Baker III and George P. Schultz.
Lott and Breaux are co-chairing the advisory board of Americans for Carbon Dividends, which announced itself Wednesday with financial backing from Exelon, First Solar and the American Wind Energy Association, along with a poll it said shows wide bipartisan support for the Baker-Schultz proposal.
Baker and Schultz’s Climate Leadership Council, formed last year, proposed a carbon fee of $43/ton starting in 2021 that would return the funds to Americans as monthly dividends. Backers say the plan would provide net payments to 70% of Americans while reducing emissions more than the U.S. commitment under the Paris Agreement.
Escalating the fee by 3 to 6% per year would reduce carbon emissions by 34 to 36% from 2005 levels by 2025, they say, and eliminate the need for existing carbon regulations such as the Clean Power Plan. (See Baker’s Carbon Dividends Plan Reaches Across Aisle.)
“This is the inevitable climate solution and the most likely to lead to a grand bipartisan climate compromise,” said Hill+Knowlton Strategies Managing Director Richard Keil, the newly formed group’s spokesman in a press conference Wednesday. Keil noted that former Federal Reserve Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen and former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman have signed on to the plan as founders of the CLC.
Keil said the new group was formed to signal the move to an “inside the Beltway strategy” after the CLC spent last year on policy development and working outside the Beltway.
Breaux acknowledged Congress is unlikely to embrace the plan any time soon. “This is an educational program that we’re embarking upon … which means we will be talking to leaders in the Congress in both parties. … This is not a sprint. It’s going to be a marathon.”
“I think that both parties are desperate … to find something that they can agree on,” he added.
“I took quite some time to look at this issue and think about it,” Lott said. “I’m convinced this is the solution that we have been looking for as a country and, frankly, in the world.”
Ted Halstead, CEO of the carbon dividends group and the CLC, said Republicans’ views on climate change have shifted over the last five years. “[There’s] no real differences numerically between where younger Republicans and younger Democrats are on this. I don’t want to overstate it because I don’t have a side-by-side comparison of numbers to do this, but it at least in general reminds me about how … attitudes within the Republican Party shifted on issues like gay marriage over the last 10 years. The next generation of Republicans thinks about these and other things differently than some of their older peers.”
The group released a poll showing 81% of likely voters, including 71% of moderate Republicans and 58% of conservative Republicans, agree the government should act to limit carbon emissions. It said the tax-and-rebate strategy is favored by a 2:1 margin overall.
“Members of Congress pay attention to polls,” Breaux said.
In addition to bringing on Hill+Knowlton to handle communications, Americans for Carbon Dividends has hired Squire Patton Boggs — where Lott and Breaux are senior counsels — as lobbyist and Margaret Lauderback, an ally of Rick Perry and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, to lead fundraising. Political consultant Mark McKinnon, a former advisor to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former President George W. Bush, and Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, have signed on as senior advisers. Former Bush aide Karen Hughes is of counsel.
