But wind power’s political travails did help kindle my interest in carbon taxing. “If carbon fuels were taxed for their damage to the climate,” I mused in a 2006 article in Orion magazine, “wind power’s profit margins would widen, and surrounding communities could extract bigger tax revenues from wind farms,” helping ease the path to public acceptance and regulatory approvals. A few months after writing that, I co-founded CTC.

Nevertheless, the sharper irony, addressed here, is that the cap-and-trade program that is being vilified for perpetrating environmental inequities appears in practice to be diminishing them.

The council’s Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends is the first Republican-based carbon tax proposal to insist not only on starting high (at $40 per ton of CO2) but also “dividend-ing” the revenues to U.S. families rather than using them to pay for corporate tax cuts (as favored by the political right) or investing them in transit, renewables and other elements of “the just transition” (as favored by much of the left).

Campaigns for state carbon taxes educate the public and advance the idea on the policy map. A carbon tax in one or more states will create facts on the ground that can appeal to Left and Right alike and upend the climate stalemate.

A charitable way to view Food and Water Watch’s intemperate and misguided attacks this week on carbon taxing is that these energetic activists are so consumed with fighting fracking, pipelines and mines that they haven’t had time to absorb how carbon taxes can help dry up the “need” for new fossil fuel infrastructure.

If climate change is a war, the millennials are fighting while the establishment is hiding. Calling out the old guard’s “deafening silence” (or worse) on the Washington state carbon tax.

The Carbon Tax Center released a letter signed by 32 notable individuals calling for a carbon tax--from right to left--from Robert Reich to Jerry Taylor (Cato, ALEC) to George Schultz of the Hoover Institute and former Secretary of State under Reagan.