An impressive list of names endorse a carbon dividend proposal published in The Wall Street Journal this week. They include 27 Nobel Prize winners plus former Treasury secretaries, Federal Reserve chairmen and White House economists.

They propose not only a steadily rising fossil-energy tax, but a new bureaucracy to distribute the proceeds to every American in annual “dividend” payments. They would repeal the existing panoply of green subsidies and mandates. Their program also requires a new import tax to stop U.S. industry from shifting its carbon-intensive activities offshore.

Their plan contains quite a few moving parts. As Texas Democrat and new liberal heartthrob Beto O’Rourke seems to say about everything these days, let’s start a discussion!

And that’s the problem. I can’t help thinking of the original grand bargain worked up by the tobacco industry, plaintiffs’ lawyers, the states, and antismoking groups in 1997. Here’s our program, now enact it, they said to Congress. Never were Republicans and Democrats so united in telling a collection of special interests to get lost.

By its very breadth and radical nature, the carbon-dividend plan announces a climate emergency. This concession Democrats will gladly embrace, along with any chance to enact a new tax. But distributing the proceeds equally to the rich? That sounds insufficiently progressive. Besides, since we face a “climate emergency,” wouldn’t the money be better spent on speeding up deployment of wind and solar? As for existing mandates and subsidies, sure, we might expend additional political energy to repeal these. And pigs might fly.