Even Fucking Exxon Knows We Need a Carbon Tax

Carbon emissions are causing global warming that will amount to a worldwide disaster unless we immediately bring it under control. The best tool for this is a carbon tax. How clear is this fact? Even Exxon is supporting it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that ExxonMobil, the biggest publicly traded oil company on earth, is now actively lobbying for a carbon tax in America.

Top Exxon officials have been more vocal about their support for a carbon tax and have met with Capitol Hill offices about related legislation, according to the company’s recent lobby disclosure forms.

For the past six months, Exxon has been asserting its position more in meetings within trade associations, including the American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, according to multiple reports from people who have attended meetings with Exxon officials.

Why would ExxonMobil be lobbying for an enormous tax on its main products? Because when you get to as large as ExxonMobil, you realize that you have a very important institutional stake in the continued well-being and stability of the world in which you conduct your profitable business. Rationality, in other words, compels institutions like Exxon or The Pentagon to try to intelligently address the danger of climate change. Whereas more minor idiots, frauds, and hustlers can try to ignore climate change or just try to get as much money as they can before it all goes to hell, a $385 billion company has nowhere to hide. Global catastrophe is bad for business. Therefore, carbon tax.

(A caveat: Exxon is advocating for a “revenue neutral” carbon tax, meaning that other taxes would be cut in order to offset the tax increases of a carbon tax. This is rather less patriotic and heroic, since it would presumably not increase the company’s overall tax bill. But if revenue neutral is the only way we can get a carbon tax passed, then fuck it. We should still do it. Discouraging carbon emissions is worth a corporate tax cut.)

At this year’s Fourth of July celebrations, why not talk to your friends and acquaintances about the need for a carbon tax? I know I will.