Exxon Puts Up $1 Million to Campaign for a Carbon Tax

Rare donation to fight climate change represents a break with fellow oil giants—and with the Trump administration

Exxon Mobil Corp. is committing $1 million over two years to promote a tax on carbon emissions by corporations, one of the few times an oil company has given money to make fighting climate change a political priority in Washington.

Exxon sees a carbon tax as an alternative to patchwork regulations, putting one cost on all carbon emitters nationwide, eliminating regulatory uncertainty hovering over Exxon’s business in states that might seek to target oil companies, the person said.

.. Exxon’s contribution will go to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a new group co-chaired by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. It is promoting a carbon tax-plus-dividend policy first proposed by two former secretaries of state, James Baker III and George Shultz, last year. All three figures are Republicans.

The idea is to discourage companies from emitting carbon through the tax, but to avoid burdening consumers by returning the money to Americans through what the group calls a “carbon dividend” that it estimates could be as much as $2,000 annually per family.

On climate change issues, Exxon finds itself in unlikely opposition to many in the Republican Party, at a time the GOP holds the White House and majorities in Congress. Republican leaders there have often derided the idea of global warming and shown contempt for taxes as a solution.

While the Baker-Shultz plan is designed to be revenue-neutral by sending all of the money directly back to Americans, critics say it is too nuanced and complicated to be palatable.

.. “I don’t think the base would believe that, even if it were true,” said George David Banks, a former adviser to Mr. Trump on climate issues. “Not only are you asking the base to support climate policy, but you’re asking them to support a tax. You’re asking them to support a double whammy.”

General Motors Co. , Johnson & Johnson , and other oil companies, including BP PLC, are founding members of the Climate Leadership Council, the organization fine-tuning the details of the Baker-Shultz plan.

.. It pledged this year to cut its methane emissions 15% by 2020, it has touted its research to make fuels from algae and its chief executive

.. If big companies—especially fossil-fuel companies—make climate policy a lobbying priority, it could open the door to an eventual solution or compromise, though it may be years away and not include this plan or any carbon tax.

.. “This is an interesting and important signal shift. For years, Exxon’s political effort was all on the side of climate denial and obstruction,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). “At least Exxon money is now on both sides of the fight.”

Is Trump the Second Coming of Reagan?

Fox News’s Bret Baier wants you to think he just might be.

.. Bret Baier, chief political anchor of Fox News, President Trump’s favorite network, insists he isn’t living in some alternate reality. He knows that our current President is louder, cruder, and ruder than Ronald Reagan, “a counterpuncher” from New York far different from his genial Republican predecessor.

.. Right before our conversation, Baier had appeared on the radio with Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-show host who reveres Reagan so much he refers to him as Ronaldus Magnus. Limbaugh waxed on to Baier about “the parallels” between two different men, and Baier agreed. “Exactly,” he said. “One thing you can say is, like Reagan, Trump has changed the paradigm. I mean, the jury’s still out on the end result, but the game changed in the way Washington worked.”

.. Since the start of Trump’s outsider campaign to remake the Republican Party in his own image, his partisans have branded him a Reagan for our times—a brasher and brusquer one, perhaps, but like Reagan in that they were both renegades who fought the party establishment and politically revitalized the G.O.P. with a new coalition of former Democrats like themselves. This is the “heads were exploding then, heads are exploding now” part of Baier’s argument.

.. An establishment figure no less than James Baker, Reagan’s first-term White House chief of staff, has said that Trump’s ascendance reminded him of Reagan’s; he made the remark during a lunch before Nancy Reagan’s funeral, in 2016, as Trump was in the midst of trouncing sixteen other Republicans to take the nomination of a party whose leaders had hardly welcomed him.

.. when they met in the spring of 2016, Baker handed Trump a two-page memo full of advice, which Trump promptly ignored.

  1. .. “Number one,” Adelman told me, “Reagan was a Republican. Number two:
  2. Reagan was a conservative and it’s clear Trump is not. Number three:
  3. Reagan was a very, very decent person…. And number four:
  4. basically, Reagan was very competent.”

.. Kristol told me the Republican whom President Trump most resembles is not Ronald Reagan, but Richard Nixon. “I would say Trump is more like Nixon, though it’s unfair to Nixon in that Nixon was a more serious person,” Kristol said. “He’s more Nixon than Reagan, but of course a much degraded version of Nixon.”

.. In Republican circles, Reagan’s brand remains as golden as the lettering on Trump Tower. The endless Fox News segments with pictures of Reagan and Trump flashing on screen together certainly give the impression of a well-timed and not particularly subtle image-burnishing campaign.

.. A report in New York magazine that was released before we met claimed that Sean Hannity, the Fox prime-time star, talks to the President on the phone as frequently as several times a day, often at night before they go to bed.