carbon tax

A package of good stories

Rolling Stone has a package of stories on Al Gore’s climate crusade in the current issue. First up is a long interview with the man himself , including this nice tidbit: What figure in the administration, other than the president himself, do you hold most responsible for standing in the way of meaningful change on […]

Color me unimpressed

You can color me unimpressed by the big news today in the Globe and Mail: Quebec just became the first Canadian province to pass a carbon tax. For one thing, the tax is tiny, just 0.8 cents per liter of gasoline, and at comparably low levels on natural gas and diesel. (For non-metricized Americans, that's 3 cents per gallon.) So that makes Quebec's new approach not quite as aggressive as -- to pick just one example at random -- Idaho's 5 cent per gallon increase circa 1996.

Now in fairness to Quebec, the new carbon tax revenue, which weighs in at about $200 million, will be spent on seeking greenhouse gas reductions. That's a big improvement over previous gas taxes in the States, where the money normally gets shoveled back into roads.

Strangely, however, Quebec's government seems intent on preventing the tax from actually influencing consumer behavior. To wit:

Natural Resources Minister Claude Béchard called on the oil companies to be good corporate citizens and do their share to protect the environment by absorbing the cost of the new tax. "We call on their good faith and social responsibility."

Wait, what?

Carbon tax v. cap and trade — the hottest arguments since McCartney v. Lennon

The argument over the best climate change mitigation policy is gathering steam. Busting out all over. Topping the charts. All the kids are dancing to it. Before getting to the latest, though, it’s worth making a simple point: either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax could reduce GHG emissions if properly designed and implemented; either could […]

Imagine a politician leveling with citizens about something

This is a great column from a former Winnipeg mayor: "Higher oil prices or carbon tax: Take your pick." Imagine if all politicians were as frank. Why, we might even have the kind of discourse Al Gore mourns losing in The Assault on Reason.

Business is splitting from Republicans; the time is right for a tax

In Washington Monthly, Chris Hayes draws attention to the "revolt of the CEOs." Big Business is parting ways with the Republican Party, actively seeking greater government involvement in the realms of health care and climate change. Why? Two reasons. One, CEOs recognize that rising health care costs and global warming are real problems that will […]

A rejoinder to Environmental Defense

Can any of Environmental Defense's three main points stand up to scrutiny?

ED: A carbon tax can be gamed as easily as a carbon trading scheme.

CTC: A carbon tax may be subject to gaming, but cap-and-trade positively invites it. USCAP concedes that some allowances will be given out (not auctioned) at the outset, which means protracted, high-stakes negotiations ("a giant food fight," a leading utility executive called it) over free allowances that will be worth billions. How will these be allocated? What baseline year? Watch earth burn as the polluters jockey for the baseline giving them the most allowances! With a carbon tax, by contrast, any tax preferences or exemptions will at least be visible and locked in, and thus potentially removable. This difference is part of why former Commerce Undersecretary Robert Shapiro wrote recently that carbon taxes, compared to cap-and-trade, "are much less vulnerable to evasion and market manipulation, providing a more stable and transparent system for consumers and industry alike."

Conservative critique of the carbon tax

This story contains two things: Evidence that when it comes to climate and energy policy, mainstream Democratic politicians (+ John McCain) are more or less in consensus: yes on "the need to enhance energy efficiency, introduce a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, and incentivize clean energy technology,” no to a carbon tax. The worst argument […]

Getting something done is the priority

The following is a guest essay from Tony Kreindler of Environmental Defense, in response to Charles Komanoff’s post from earlier today, "Strange bedfellows in climate politics." —– Charles Komanoff’s post is entertaining, but a lot of what he says is wrong. His main proposition is that unlike "devilishly complex" cap-and-trade, a carbon tax is straightforward […]

The former: Not good for the latter

How climate change will disproportionately affect the world's poor is a message making the rounds of late, after the publication of the second IPCC report earlier this year. How climate change policies, such as carbon taxes, will either help or hurt the poor is also a topic we've been discussing of late.

Now researchers at the University of Minnesota have assessed the impact of an increased dependence on biofuels on the developing world ... and the outlook isn't good.

In short, conflating food and energy lands us in a quagmire in which corn (and ethanol) prices are still tethered to oil: