Dan Esty
Dan Esty will bring an environment-saving idea from New Haven to New York Monday for the national launch of a new movement to remove party labels and insert new thinking into our government. Esty’s idea would begin with an extra nickel charge at the gas pump.
Esty, a Yale professor and former federal environmental official, plans to join the inaugural gathering of the “No Labels” organization at Columbia University. He’s one of a group of local people planning to attend, including West Rock Alderman Darnell Goldson and two of the state chapter’s three leaders: East Rock activist Debra Hauser and Brett D. Hellerman, founder and CEO of Church Street-headquartered Wood Creek Capital Management. (Read a previous story here about their reasons for signing up.)
“No Labels” promises to bring centrist Democrats, Republicans and independents together to form 50 state chapters and support middle-of-the-road policies and candidates. Much of the initial pundit chatter has focused on whether politicians like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman — both of whom plan to attend Monday — will seek to use the group as a base for 2012 candidacies (Bloomberg for president, Lieberman for reelection as senator).
A second question about the movement could have more significance for the future of the country: After this diverse group of people gets beyond the bromides about bipartisan breaking of Democratic and Republican orthodoxies, what will their new ideas for government policy look like?
That’s where a founding member of the national group like Esty comes in. As a former Environmental Protection Agency deputy chief of staff under the first Republican President George Bush, and now a Yale law school and environmental school professor who travels the world promoting action to combat climate change, Esty signed up with No Labels to do some of that policy crafting — environmental policy crafting. About how to wean America from reliance on foreign oil. How to make the air safer to breathe. How to promote conservation and cleaner alternative energy sources. How to help new companies produce better solar panels or fuel cells. How to reinitiate U.S. leadership on fighting global warming and saving the planet. How to create jobs, how help companies produce better fuel cells or solar panels or wind turbines, how to stop getting drawn into foreign wars over oil, how to cut the deficit, in the process.
And how to do that in a way Democrats and Republicans appear unwilling or unable to.
“Are we going to find ways to get out from under our burden of imported oil?” Esty asked in a conversation Thursday. “Are we going to find ways so we don’t have to extend our military reach across the world to protect energy supply lines? Will our children get the benefit of a clean energy future? Are we going to strength U.S. energy competitiveness?”
In the quest to answer “yes” to all the above, Esty has drawn up a plan for a “harm charge” or “pollution” charge, an at-first small surcharge on use of greenhouse gases that over time would lead industries to develop greener alternatives, without government “picking winners” by throwing money at individual products or even in some cases individual companies it believes will succeed in the marketplace.
In Esty’s telling, this issue is a prime examples of the “No Labels” critique and mission: That the Democrats and Republicans are stuck in rigid, outdated ideological approaches, unable to compromise or advance workable new solutions.
“We’ve had a terrible breakdown in Washington in our ability to get action on climate change. The international negotiations [that] are going on in Mexico will collapse [Friday] without a new treaty being concluded to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol. We’re not going to get an international agreement because the U.S. has not been able to come to the negotiations with any U.S. climate change plan in place,” he said.
“Washington D.C.‘s failure to come together on an energy strategy puts in peril not just climate change progress — which it has really derailed — but more broadly puts in peril our economic prosperity going forward” as well as global security.
How It’d Work
Under Esty’s plan for a “harm charge,” the country would put a $5‑per-ton levy on oil starting in 2012. It would gradually ramp up over 20 years to $100 per ton. Oil companies would pay the levy on the front end; it would probably trickle down to consumers at the pump in the form of a five-cent-per gallon initial charge, Esty estimated.
The idea is that in the short term that modest charge wouldn’t endanger jobs. But it would signal to oil companies, investors and entrepreneurs: A bigger charge is coming. So when you spend money on long-term strategy, look elsewhere. Oil will cost more. That means successful new products using solar energy, or improvements that enable factories or homes to consume less fuel, will pay off.
By the end of 20 years, the charge would produce hundreds of billions of dollars, Esty said. His plan would call for much of it to go directly to paying down the country’s deficit; the rest would go to basic scientific research.
Such an idea differs from both the current Republican and Democratic approaches, he said. Republicans oppose government steps to raise money or otherwise take action against oil companies. (“Let’s not do anything,” in Esty’s words.) Democrats try to steer the market by directly subsidizing specific alternative energy ideas or companies. They don’t trust the market enough to figure out the best new ideas, he said. None of the new money would go to private companies; it would go straight to research on the “underlying science we build innovation on” such as an MIT lab project on the physics of carbon capture or a Yale project on the chemistry of carbon capture and storage.
“This is an investment that no company is likely to undertake because the payout is so far out in the future and the risks are so high,” Esty said. Government has a role to play here, not in using taxpayer money to decide that, say, a new electric car or solar panel will do better than a new fuel cell or wind turbine, he argued; that’s the private sector’s job.
He can remember a time when Democrats and Republicans could work together on such ideas, he said. Because he was there. A Democrat, he worked for Republican President George H. W. Bush’s administration. He served as special assistant to the head of the EPA, then deputy chief of staff, then head of the policy office. That was when the notion of “cap and trade” arose: of allowing computers to trade pollution credits as a way to limit overall pollution by relying in large part on the free market rather than more intensive government regulation.
Like many (if not most) big environmental ideas of the 20th century, starting with Teddy Roosevelt through President Nixon, this one emerged in a Republican administration. Now the political world has changed: In this past election cycle, Republicans tarred Democrats as socialists (or worse) if they supported cap and trade. The idea died. Leading Tea Party figures — most prominently Fox TV host Glenn Beck — called for completing the extraction of the Republican Party away from its roots in the progressive tradition of a century earlier.
“There was a day when we were working on issues like the environment across party lines,” Esty said. “If you look at the history of environmental law in our country, most of the laws were passed when there was a Democratic Congress and a Republican president.”
“Particularly in New England we had a history of Republican leaders” like Sens. Ed Brooke (Massachusetts), Lowell Weicker (Connecticut) and John Chafee (Rhode Island) championing the environment, he said.
His analysis dovetails with the argument of moderate Republicans drawn to “No Labels” type discussions, who question whether their party no longer has room for them. Some conservative Democrats like Joe Lieberman — whom primary voters rejected in 2006, leading to his successful reelection campaign as an independent — say the same about their party. Meanwhile, voters have abandoned the major parties, swelling the rolls of “independent” registrees. In Connecticut, independents outnumber Democrats and Republicans.
Some presidential candidates have made that moderate, policy-above-politics appeal over the past three decades. Republican John Anderson tried it in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries and then as a third-party candidate the same year. Democrats Bruce Babbit and Paul Tsongas tried it in the 1988 and 1992 primaries, respectively. Ross Perot won 18 percent of the vote with a similar presidential campaign in 1992, elevating the deficit to a top issue. But his Reform Party failed to survive its founder’s campaign, much as in Connecticut the centrist, putatively post-partisan “A Connecticut Party” disappeared after the retirement of independent Gov. Weicker.
When the “No Labels” iteration gathers at Columbia Monday, its members probably won’t get into nitty-gritty policy conversations about ideas like Dan Esty’s harm charge. They’ll be setting the stage instead. If the movement gets further than its predecessors and become a sustaining national force rather than a vehicle for a popular or wealthy standard-bearer, it will have to have those conversations.
Previous coverage of the No Labels movement: