Showing posts with label carbon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carbon. Show all posts

Monday, February 18, 2019

Carbon tax and dividend--now supported by 3300 economists from Aaron to Zykaj

The Financial Times reports on the growing number of U.S. economists who support a carbon tax, with the money to be returned to citizens as equal lump sum rebates.

Surge in US economists’ support for carbon tax to tackle emissions

"The carbon tax proposal, organised by the Climate Leadership Council, is a bipartisan effort that has united senior economists from both parties, and now garnered 3,300 signatures from professional economists and academics across the US."
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Here's the statement, and a list of all the signers from Henry Aaron to Blerina Zykaj; it's a long list...

ECONOMISTS’ STATEMENT ON CARBON DIVIDENDS
The Largest Public Statement of Economists in History
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Earlier post:

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Carbon tax with revenue returned through equal lump-sum rebates: open letter

An open letter from many economists, published today as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, proposes a carbon tax with the revenue to be returned to taxpayers, as a way to put incentives in place to deal with climate change.
 Here it is in the WSJ: 
Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends--Bipartisan agreement on how to combat climate change.

And you can click through to the oped (ungated) and related articles at https://www.clcouncil.org/?mod=article_inline

ECONOMISTS’ STATEMENT ON CARBON DIVIDENDS

27 Nobel laureates, all 4 former Fed Chairs, and 15 former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers unite behind carbon dividends as the bipartisan climate solution.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Climate negotiation design

Axel Ockenfels writes:

David MacKay, Peter Cramton, Steven Stoft and I published a comment on climate negotiation design today in Nature (my stay in Stanford way extremely useful in this respect ;-). 


And here is a link to an ebook that we compiled, which has lots of background material by us and others, including Tirole, Stiglitz, Weitzman, and Nordhaus: http://carbon-price.com/

There have been a couple of newspaper articles on that (and more are coming), too, such as:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34489266
["If you know a carbon price will apply to all other countries as well as you, it now comes in your self interest to advocate a high carbon price" David MacKay, University of Cambridge]



The Nature comment comes with a picture to illustrate the problem of all pulling together...

Price carbon — I will if you will  David J. C. MacKay, Peter Cramton, Axel Ockenfels& Steven Stoft ,12 October 2015

"Negotiations at the United Nations climate summit in Paris this December will adopt a 'pledge and review' approach to cutting global carbon emissions. Countries will promise to reduce their emissions by amounts that will be revised later. The narrative is that this will “enable an upward spiral of ambition over time”1. History and the science of cooperation predict that quite the opposite will happen.
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"Success requires a common commitment, not a patchwork of individual ones. Negotiations need to be designed to realign self-interests and promote cooperation. A common commitment can assure participants that others will match their efforts and not free-ride. A strategy of “I will if you will” stabilizes higher levels of cooperation. It is the most robust pattern of cooperation seen in laboratory and field studies of situations open to free-riding"
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"We, and others, propose an alternative: a global carbon-price commitment7. Each country would commit to place charges on carbon emissions from fossil-fuel use (by taxes or cap-and-trade schemes, for example) sufficient to match an agreed global price, which could be set by voting — by a super-majority rule that would produce a coalition of the willing.

"A uniform carbon price is widely accepted as the most cost-effective way to curb emissions. Carbon pricing is flexible, allowing fossil taxes, cap-and-trade, hybrid schemes and other national policies to be used (unlike a global carbon tax). All that is required of a country is that its average carbon price — cost per unit of greenhouse gas emitted — be at least as high as the agreed global carbon price.

"Unlike global cap-and-trade, carbon pricing allows countries to keep all carbon revenues, eliminating the risk of needing to buy expensive credits from a rival country. Taxes need not rise if a nation performs a green tax shift — reducing taxes on good things such as employment by charging for pollution. Shifting taxes from good things to bad things could mean there is no net social cost to pricing carbon, even before counting climate benefits"