Carbon Tax: Barriers and Solutions

Although there is a broad consensus that we need to “price carbon” to enable markets to account for the external costs of burning fossil fuels, no proposed national carbon tax legislation has received significant traction since the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in 2010. One formula, long advocated by the non-partisan Citizens’ Climate Lobby but never proposed as legislation, is to simply refund the tax revenue in equal shares to individuals. CCL proposed starting at $15 per ton (which equates to 15 cents per gallon of gas) with an annual increase of $10 a ton forever. CCL has been… [more]