Why Climate Activists Must Seize On The Oil Price Crash

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/12/why-climate-activists-must-seize-oil-price-crash

The oil bust is a policy opportunity, one that will either be exploited by the fossil fuel industry or climate activists, who can use it to ensure that carbon stays in the ground over the long-term.

The fossil fuel lobby realizes this all too clearly. In fact, it has already taken advantage of the price crash to overturn the decades-old, once untouchable US ban on exporting crude oil, ramping up “an aggressive, multi-year lobbying campaign” in Congress that only caught fire last year as prices nosedived.

As part of a year-end budget deal reached in December, just days after the UN climate summit in Paris produced an agreement, fossil fuel proponents tucked in a provision that fully liberalized the oil trade, allowing crude to be shipped overseas. The ban had been in place forty years but was quickly undone. The first shipment left Texas on New Years’ Eve, headed for Italy.

The bill also extended tax credits for solar and wind, which will help accelerate clean energy deployment, something Democrats trumpeted. But exports will lead to more drilling. Oil Change International called it a “disaster for the climate.”

But cheap energy can also be seized in climate policy. Low prices for coal have battered coal mining companies, helping to neuter the coal lobby. In January, President Obama indefinitely halted all new coal mining on federal lands with only a whimper from the coal industry and its allies in the Congress.

Now, the White House is following that up with a plan to tax oil in order to fund clean energy and mass transit. The idea, part of Obama’s latest budget proposal, is a good one: tax oil at $10.25 per barrel, and use the $30 billion raised each year to fund high-speed rail, light rail, buses, electric car charging stations, and research into other technologies to reduce carbon emissions. It would be a very large down payment on transitioning away from the fossil fuel economy, dependent on highways, parking lots, big cars, and suburban sprawl.