“A lot of Republicans are at least getting the intellectual argument” for a carbon tax, Rooney told me recently. But actually joining a bill is risky for them. “It’s like walking out in muddy water—you’re not sure whether there’s a stingray down there or something.”

The new study—which Columbia conducted along with the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm—finds no stingrays. If the EICDA passes next year, it would cut American carbon emissions by at least 36 percent by 2030 as compared with their all-time high. It would also slash toxic air pollution and save most Americans money.

The bill is “a very aggressive, climate-hawk version of a carbon tax,” Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University and an author of the study, told me. In the bill’s first year, it imposes a price of $15 on every ton of carbon pollution. That fee then rises by at least $10 a year—except in years when pollution does not decrease fast enough, in which case the fee would increase by $15. By 2030, the United States could see a carbon price in excess of $100 a ton, adding at least 90 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas.

Yet the study highlights why a carbon tax could be politically challenging. Nearly all of the bill’s carbon cuts will arrive by 2025, when the study projects that carbon emissions will have declined by about 32 percent. (Under President Barack Obama’s policies, emissions would have fallen by 28 percent by 2025. Emissions have risen under President Trump.) And most of the bill’s declines come from the power sector.

“Coal is basically gone in 2030 under the carbon tax,” Kaufman said. At the same time, renewables grow to generate nearly half of American power.

How Electricity Generation Would Change Under a Carbon Tax

As the 2020s wear on, the tax will apply across nearly the entire economy—and it will keep rising. By the end of the decade, the coal industry will probably be dead. But its death will be associated with a rise in the cost of gasoline, the energy cost that Americans notice most. It’s possible that a carbon tax of about $80 a ton would face diminishing returns, Kaufman said, though he noted that might be a result of the energy-system model used by the study.

There is one big benefit associated with high taxes: bigger checks. In 2020, every adult with a Social Security number would receive a monthly check for $50, the study projects. But after a decade, those same checks would come to roughly $275 a month, or $3,300 a year. Children with a Social Security number would receive a check half that size.

And while household energy costs would also rise under the plan, they would not grow as quickly as the checks. Most families would come out ahead. “It’s a very progressive policy, because rich people spend so much more in aggregate terms on energy than lower-income people,” Kaufman said.