Carbon Tax

A coal-burning power station can be seen located next to a lake on the outskirts of Beijing (REUTERS/David Gray).

Article

A Realistic Timetable for Greenhouse Gas Regulation Under the Clean Air Act

September 26, 2013, Philip A. Wallach

Philip Wallach writes that the regulations likely to be produced under the Clean Air Act will be inefficient; the act, written for very different purposes, provides a singularly unsteady basis for climate change policy. Even putting aside those concerns, and assuming that EPA in Obama’s second term (and beyond) fully commits itself to regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, there is likely to be a huge delay before any policy could be meaningfully implemented.

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In the News

On the environmental objective, certainly we are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. But we argue that the best way to address that would be to put a price on carbon, for example through a carbon tax, rather than try to subsidize alternatives. [That]'s much less efficient. The way the [current] rules work, electric vehicle manufacturers can sell credits to other automakers toward their fuel economy standards, so that means that other automakers can sell more polluting cars for every electric car that's sold.
February 23, 2013, Adele Morris, National Public Radio
In the News

There's going to be a demand for revenue, essentially, for the United States government to close its budget deficit over the coming years, and a carbon tax is one way where there's a possibility of taxing so-called bad CO2 emissions and off setting that with tax reductions on capital or income and this could have a positive effect of improving effiency and stimulating economic growth.
November 30, 2012, Joshua Meltzer, Sky Business
In the News

We should reform the tax system, no question. We are going to need to move beyond the current set of tax instruments to raise the needed revenues—a VAT and or a carbon tax seem like the obvious ways to go.
November 27, 2012, William G. Gale, New York Times