This section of our Web site covers seven subjects:
- Inflation Reduction Act: The U.S. 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is designed to reduce carbon emissions in vehicular travel and other economic sectors through a broad range of energy incentives and subsidies led by measures to reduce the cost to manufacture and sell electric vehicles. This page links to coverage of the IRA and explores its likely implications for both carbon emissions and the project to enact economy-wide carbon taxes in the U.S.
- Carbon Pricing and Environmental Justice considers the turn against carbon pricing by the environmental- and climate-justice movement — the community of individuals and organizations dedicated to overturning entrenched and disproportionate pollution burdens borne by African-Americans and other communities of color in the United States — and presents evidence that carbon taxing, though ostensibly race-neutral, will strongly benefit disadvantaged communities.
- Progressives and Carbon Pricing — a companion page to the one directly above — offers “10 reasons progressives have soured on carbon pricing” and seeks to distinguish the rhetoric branding carbon taxes as failed neoliberal policy from the reality that a robust carbon price is essential to rapid and equitable decarbonization of the U.S. economy.
- Conservatives: Explores Republican office-holders’ near-monolithic opposition to meaningful climate policy action including carbon pricing, while also covering occasional signs of interest by conservatives in revenue-neutral carbon pricing such as fee-and-dividend.
- Green New Deal: The ambitious climate rubric, built around massive public investment with millions of new jobs converting the American economy to a clean-energy system, that has taken center stage in progressive policy circles.
- Wealth Taxes: Increased taxing of extreme wealth, including but not limited to billionaire profiteering during the Covid-19 pandemic, can be both a source of funding for the Green New Deal and a key means to make American society more just and democratic.
- Covid-19: A page presenting writings about the pandemic that touch on the climate crisis and the future of our species.