A carbon tax is unnecessarily discriminatory. By that I mean it places a larger than needed burden on some polluters than on others. For example, assume there are two 1,000 tonne per year polluters producing the same product. However, the CO2 abatement cost for one is $40 per tonne and $400 per tonne for the other.
A major, if not the primary, reason to tax carbon is to make carbon intensive goods more expensive. Tax proponents say we will buy fewer of these goods if they cost more. Lower sales will encourage producers to shrink their carbon footprint.
Read more “Blowing Smoke?”
In Eating One’s Young and Pricing Carbon Does Not a Market Make, I observe an obvious fact: a carbon tax is not collected if there are no emissions. Tax revenues exist only where abatement policy has failed. Where policy succeeds, both revenues and
Read more “Unfairness #1: Carbon Tax as Tariff”
Market efficiencies are touted as a carbon tax benefit. This is a misconception; a myth easily belied. Markets have buyers and sellers. A commodity’s price rises and falls to sync supply with demand. If supply is short, the price rises until new suppliers find the market Read more “Pricing Carbon Does Not a Market Make”
Guppies have been known to eat their young. There are probably evolutionary reasons for this. In our vernacular, however, the idiom implies a short sighted benefit at the expense of long term advances – a quick snack endangering survival of the species. In this sense, both the carbon tax with revenue recycling and the cap and trade with auctioned allowances may also eat their young. Read more “Eating One’s Young”
A carbon tax is a bad idea, a really bad idea. This post describes one of several reasons. A carbon tax plays what was described to me as “The Rock Game.” In 2002, our attorney, hydrogeological consultant and I negotiated a consent decree with the State of Wyoming to address historical solid and hazardous waste at Read more “The Rock Game”
On March 28, 2018, I was lucky to be a guest lecturer at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. I presented this proposal for regulating greenhouse gases to Dr. Melissa R. McHale’s Ecosystem Science and Sustainability class. The students were sharp, interested and enthusiastic. Read more “Fort Collins Lecture”
It’s time to move on to CO2 regulation and apply what’s been learned from the RFS RIN market to a more significant challenge. Read more “How to Regulate CO2 – A Modest Proposal”
I will be posting on this issue once I have completed my RFS Point of Obligation posts.
I hope you will see how these two issues require similar approaches.