Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania will introduce a carbon tax bill Thursday that would fund improvements to infrastructure.
Fitzpatrick’s office confirmed the congressman’s plan for the bill.
The legislation will look similar to the “MARKET CHOICE Act,” a carbon tax bill introduced by former Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida in July of 2018 that made him the first Republican to introduce national carbon pricing legislation in nearly a decade.
Fitzpatrick co-sponsored that bill, which would have imposed a carbon tax in exchange for repealing the federal taxes on gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuels.
About 70% of the money would have gone to the Highway Trust Fund, the nearly depleted funding source that spreads money to states to help pay for transportation projects.
Curbelo intended the concept to appeal to President Trump and congressional Democrats, who have often said that they want bipartisan infrastructure legislation.
Fitzpatrick’s planned version of the bill would spend most of the tax revenue on infrastructure but also use some of the revenue to support research and development of carbon capture technologies, people with knowledge of the legislation say.
It will also maintain a feature of Curbelo’s legislation restricting the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources such as power plants under the Clean Air Act, which would be redundant with a tax.
It’s unclear if Fitzpatrick will have a Democratic co-sponsor on the bill.
Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent, is a leader of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus.
He was one of three Republicans who approved legislation that passed the Democratically-controlled House in May barring Trump from taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement. The GOP Senate did not consider the bill.
Fitzpatrick, who represents a purple district in the middle-class suburbs of northeastern Pennsylvania, is one of two Republicans in Congress publicly supporting a carbon tax.
Republican Francis Rooney of Florida, the co-chairman of the Climate Solutions Caucus, has introduced two carbon tax bills this year in the House.
One of them would use most of the revenue to reduce payroll taxes and another would would return the revenue to U.S. households as monthly rebate checks, an approach that is favored by oil and gas companies and many economists.
Democrats in Congress have also introduced a flurry of carbon tax bills in recent months, while several Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed some form of carbon pricing as part of their climate change plans.
Legislation won’t pass Congress anytime soon, given most Republicans oppose carbon pricing, but proponents hope putting different proposals on the table will generate discussion and momentum.
