A Carbon Tax - Onwards

A Carbon Tax in China ?

Tax Policy Issues in Designing a Carbon Tax

A carbon tax is a promising tool for discouraging the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In principle, a well-designed tax could reduce the risk of climate change, minimize the cost of emissions reductions, encourage innovation in low-carbon technologies, and raise new public revenue. But designing a real-world carbon tax poses significant challenges. We analyze those challenge...

Optimal carbon tax doubled

Typically, cost–benefit analysis (CBA) has suggested ‘optimal’ carbon tax regimes that result in a global temperature rise of around 3 °C, or even eventually (post-2100) 4 °C, above preindustrial levels. However, risk analysis approaches indicate that these levels of temperature rise result in climate change impacts that pose a high or very high level of risk to society and ecosystems1 (Fig. 1)...

Cap - and - Trade or a Carbon Tax ?

W political leaders in the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the U.S. Congress move toward cap-and-trade systems as their preferred approach for achieving meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, there is a lively debate among economists, many of whom have been critical of the cap-and-trade approach in the climate context and have endorsed carbon taxes i...

The Design of a Carbon Tax

We consider the design of a tax on greenhouse gas emissions for the United States. We consider three major issues: the tax rate (including the use of the revenues and rate changes over time), the optimal tax base, and international trade concerns. We show that a well-designed carbon tax can capture about 80% of U.S. emissions by taxing only a few thousand taxpayers, and almost 90% with a modest...