CCL striking a chord

Before today, I had not heard of CCL. At first, I thought we were going to be visited by CCR (Creedence Clearwater Revival) and that would have seriously rocked. But, I'm sure CCL will also manage to strike a chord with us global sustainability kids.

The main policy objectives that CCL addresses are regarding their Carbon Fee and Dividend Policy. This policy is pretty cool. According to their website, CCL claims that it will reduce carbon emissions to 50% of the levels in 1990 and add 2.8 million jobs in the next twenty years. This sounds awesome, but how will they achieve that?

The first part of the plan is to impose a Carbon Fee. The carbon fee would be minimal to start, roughly $15 per ton CO2 equivalent. Each year the fee will go up by atleast $10 per ton, depending on how well they met the goal in the previous year. This kind of incremental building will influence the fossil fuel industry and companies that rely on fossil fuels to run their systems to decrease their dependence. Decreasing the dependence will save them money in the long run and decrease the amount of emissions being released. This will help to foster more support of renewable energy systems, which produce much less or no carbon emissions.

The second part of the plan is to pay dividends to households from the the Carbon Trust. Paying households will allow for lower income families from being left behind with the increases in energy costs due to renewable energies and higher priced fossil fuels. It is interesting to see this sort of social safety net to help foster the decrease in fossil fuel dependency. Rather than just focusing on the environment, which is typically a problem with environmental policy, this idea combines environmentalism with sociocentric ideas that help to alleviate poverty and progress society as a whole.

This plan is pretty interesting as a whole. It will be interesting if they can actually get bipartisan support on these ideas because even though it is economically ideal, it is still not an idea that I feel many republicans will support.

My question for the CCL would be how long they think it will take to get enough bipartisan support to actually make this plan a reality.