Bill Text: HI SCR200 | 2023 | Regular Session | Introduced

Hawaii Senate Concurrent Resolution 200 (Prior Session Legislation)

Introduced

Bill Title: Urging The United States Congress To Adopt National Carbon Fee And Dividend Legislation.

Spectrum: Partisan Bill (Democrat 6-0)

Status: (Introduced - Dead) 2023-03-15 - Referred to PSM/AEN. [SCR200 Detail]

Download: Hawaii-2023-SCR200-Introduced.html

THE SENATE	S.C.R. NO.	200
THIRTY-SECOND LEGISLATURE, 2023
STATE OF HAWAII

SENATE CONCURRENT

RESOLUTION

urging the united states congress to adopt national carbon fee and dividend legislation.

WHEREAS, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, "Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator"; and

WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas and its concentration in the atmosphere has been increasing at progressively rapid rate for more than sixty years, as shown by measurements taken at observatories on Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, and now registers at more than four hundred twenty parts per million, which is fifty percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution; and

WHEREAS, many climate change impacts are anticipated for the Hawaiian Islands, including increases in ocean and air temperatures, sea level rise, droughts, severe weather patterns, ocean acidification, and more frequent and severe wildfires; and

WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in the most recent report of its mitigation working group that any pathway to limit warming to two degrees Celsius would have to "involve rapid and deep and in most cases immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors"; and

WHEREAS, the United States needs powerful new policies to meet its greenhouse gas emission reduction goals established in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; and

WHEREAS, imposing a tax on the burning of fossil fuels and returning the revenues to households to spend as they see fit, a carbon-pricing policy commonly known as carbon fee and dividend, is an effective and equitable way to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and

WHEREAS, carbon fee and dividend is supported by more than thirty-six hundred economists, including twenty-eight Nobel Laureates and fifteen former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, who signed a statement that begins, "A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary" and the statement continues, "to maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to American citizens through equal lump-sum rebates"; and

WHEREAS, a national carbon fee and dividend program can include border adjustments, such as carbon-content-based tariffs on products imported from countries without comparable carbon pricing and refunds to our exporters of carbon taxes paid, to maintain the competitiveness of United States businesses in global markets; and

WHEREAS, major trading partners of the United States like Canada and the European Union have adopted meaningful carbon taxes and are now considering carbon border adjustments to level the playing field by ensuring that imports are subject to the same carbon pricing as local goods; and

WHEREAS, a national carbon fee and dividend program can be implemented quickly and efficiently, and respond to the urgency of the climate crises, because the federal government already has in place mechanisms, such as the Internal Revenue Service, needed to implement and enforce the tax, and already collects taxes from fossil fuel producers and importers; and

WHEREAS, a national carbon fee and dividend program would make the United States a leader in mitigating climate change and the advancing of clean energy technologies in the 21st century, and would incentivize other countries to enact similar carbon pricing policies, thereby reducing global greenhouse gas emissions without the need for complex international agreements; now, therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED by the Senate of the Thirty-second Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session of 2023, the House of Representatives concurring, that the United States Congress is urged to pass national carbon fee and dividend legislation; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that certified copies of this Concurrent Resolution be transmitted to the President and Vice-President of the United States, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Majority Leader of the United States Senate, and members of Hawaii's congressional delegation.