After reading the elegant Climate Protection and Justice Act, I figure that a great addition to the proposed carbon tax would be a methane tax — a methane tax sweeping enough to even include a fart jar in Congress that they may fart proudly and pay their toll. As the republican economist and scientist said in Before the Flood, you could always replace the payroll tax with this carbon tax, so it doesn’t necessarily have to increase taxes overall.

What it will do is keep the warning from being as ignored as Noah was before the seas rise and the heat wave comes. You know, the warning of our best scientists (geological, astronomical, biological, etc.), our best religious leaders (The Pope and pretty much every other religious leader), our best educators (every Ivy league and state university), our best governing leaders (the United Nations), our best artists, and so on. It’ll help us heed their warning.

For the following methane tax figures, I’m pulling from the proposed tax numbers in the Climate Protection and Justice Act. We’d need it applied to cows, trash, trees, and farts.

Assuming that methane is 23 times as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas, assuming that each head of cattle produces, on average, 100kg of methane, we end up methane equivalent to 2.3 tons of carbon released per cow. Multiplying that figure by the assignments given on the original bill for carbon tax, we end with the following tax per head of cattle:

• 2017 ………………….$34.5
• 2018 ………………….$39.1
• 2019 ………………….$43.7
• 2020 ………………….$48.3
• 2021 ………………….$55.2
• 2022 ………………….$62.1
• 2023 ………………….$69.0
• 2024 ………………….$75.9
• 2025 ………………….$82.8
• 2026 ………………….$89.7
• 2027 ………………….$94.3
• 2028 ………………….$101.2
• 2029 ………………….$108.1
• 2030 ………………….$115
• 2031 ………………….$124.2
• 2032 ………………….$133.4
• 2033 ………………….$144.9
• 2034 ………………….$156.4

Similarly, food waste produces methane. If we assume that 1 ton of dry food waste produces 65kg of methane, that on average, landfills have about a 50% efficiency in turning that methane into electricity, multiply by 23, we end with about .75 tons of carbon (equivalent) per ton of dry food waste. Using that figure and multiplying by the original bill for carbon tax, and we end with the following tax per pound of dry food waste:

• 2017 ………………….$11.25
• 2018 ………………….$12.75
• 2019 ………………….$18.95
• 2020 ………………….$15.75
• 2021 ………………….$18
• 2022 ………………….$20.2
• 2023 ………………….$22.5
• 2024 ………………….$24.75
• 2025 ………………….$27

And so on, you get the gist. Considering that the average American gets rid of about 40 pounds per year, wasteful culture will get pretty expensive pretty fast. I’d recommend investing in green infrastructure where you’re using half of the money to fund more efficient plants that will turn methane into energy and the rest will go to the poor.

There are other ways to leverage this kind of tax. For instance, a tree can absorb 1 ton of carbon dioxide by its 40^th birthday. A lot of trees can live to be 80 if given half the chance, so if we did a 2-ton tax per tree cut down, it would look like:

• 2017 ………………….$30
• 2018 ………………….$34
• 2019 ………………….$38
• 2020 ………………….$42
• 2021 ………………….$48

And if you allocated it right, every $10 would plant 100 trees, so you have a magnitude of order working to negatively compound the amount of carbon in the air.

In other words, you typically build up a bill like this so that you have ammo to work with. Then you build a large consensus around it based on wide polling data and have tons of little details you can use as leverage. We may not get everything passed, but even if all we got was a carbon tax, it’s a hell of a start.

Of course, we could always just put a fart jar in Congress. You know, kind of like the swear jar in Luke Cage. The human body produces about 10 milligrams of methane every day, or equal to 230 milligrams of carbon. It would take 10 days to get up to 230 kilograms and 100 days to get 2.3 tons, which would be roughly equivalent to $35 given by every human every 100 days, or $3 per day. You break that down, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that a quarter per fart would be conservative in keeping with the established carbon tax.

There you go. A fart jar. In Congress.

You gotta mail them a quarter every time you fart. I can see it now. Gigantic change jar. Like ten-points-for-Gryphindor sized with the following on the front:

FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE

PAY YOUR FART DUES

We could even make it a competition by region. Heck, we could even use the money generated to directly fund the methane boosters that will take our terraformers to Mars.

Our air will never again smell so nice.

#fartjarsforclimate