Search Results for: komanoff

New EU Emission Target Outpaces U.S. — And Then Some

October 30, 2014 By Charles Komanoff

The European Union announced last week its intention to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030. Meanwhile, the U.S. goal remains a 17% emissions cut from 2005 levels, by 2020.

Two different percentages over two different time periods. How do the EU and U.S. trajectories compare? Is the EU’s use of a 1990 baseline cheapening its goal, as some have suggested?

EU target is nearly twice as ambitious as US goal.

No, it turns out. As the graphic shows, the 27 countries making up the European Union generated slightly less CO2 in the EU’s baseline year of 1990 than in the 2005 baseline chosen by United States authorities. More importantly, after running a few numbers, we can safely report that the EU emissions objective embodies nearly twice as high a reduction rate to 2030 from 2012 (the most recent year with comparable data) as the US target: an average annual decline in emissions of 1.87% for the EU, vs. 1.02% for the United States. [Read more…]

Climate Advocates Need to Embrace Carbon Tax

September 22, 2014 By Charles Komanoff

InsideClimate News just posted this piece as a guest editorial — today’s entry in a series leading to and during Climate Week in New York City.

By Charles Komanoff • Charles Komanoff directs the Carbon Tax Center in New York.

Which is mightier—the obstacles to enacting a U.S. carbon tax, or the tax’s unique capacity to drive down global-warming emissions quickly, massively and equitably?

At the Carbon Tax Center we’ve bet on the latter. And our bet will only get better if the climate movement coalesces its advocacy and organizing around a carbon tax.

Making polluters pay to emit carbon isn’t just textbook economics and basic fairness—though it is those things. A carbon tax is the only way for the climate damage caused by burning fossil fuels to be brought inside the arc of individual and societal decision-making that determines how much of those fuels society uses and, thus, how much carbon it emits.

Our banner sagged a bit during the People’s Climate March. Our message couldn’t be more clear.

These decisions range from the immediate and quotidian: take transit vs. car, refill at the tap vs. buy bottled water; to institutional and far-reaching: build airplane frames with ultralight composites vs. aluminum, locate in town vs. on the outskirts, contract with a wind farm vs. a coal generator.

Without a tax on carbon emissions, every choice like these―and billions are made daily―will remain so rigged that fossil fuels will never yield their central position in world energy supply—or at least not fast enough to keep climate change from spiraling out of control. But a tax gives us a fighting chance to keep climate tipping points at bay and stave off global warming’s most dire effects.

Notice I said carbon tax, not “price on carbon.” Forget cap-and-trade. It’s too complicated to resonate with the public, and too prone to manipulation and gaming. Moreover, the “revealed” prices from markets in carbon permits will always be too volatile for low-carbon entrepreneurs to bank on and for treasury departments to count on.

For a carbon price to be revenue-neutral—as I believe it must to command broad and bipartisan support—the revenue it will generate from one year to the next must be reasonably predictable. That means a knowable price, which only a carbon tax provides.

Why not pursue the politically easier path of subsidizing clean energy? Empirical evidence, for one thing. As we demonstrated in a report to the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year, even a perfectly tailored subsidies regime won’t deliver half as much carbon reduction as an equivalently priced carbon tax. Not to mention that subsidies require taxpayer dollars.

What about the EPA Clean Power Plan? Ingenious and well-meaning, to be sure. But too little, too late. The cuts apply only to electricity, they’re measured against a high (2005) baseline, and the states have until 2030 to comply. These concessions, while defensible on political grounds, have whittled down the plan’s target to a mere 7 percent cut in total U.S. CO2 emissions. And even that will necessitate navigating a minefield of litigation.

Why not simply mandate ever-decreasing carbon contents in every sector of use? Standards have helped make autos and appliances far more efficient, but making them the central climate strategy would require thousands of efficiency standards, each one bitterly contested. Moreover, standards by nature are reactive and binary, which leaves huge savings untapped. Not so for a carbon tax, which incentivizes each and every investment and behavior that cuts emissions.

The “gold standard” for a carbon tax is the Managed Carbon Price Act introduced in May by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.). The tax starts modestly, at $15 per ton of carbon dioxide, but rises stepwise to pass $100 within a decade. By effectively raising the prices of every BTU of natural gas, oil and, especially, coal burned in the United States, the McDermott bill will, by our estimates, cut U.S. carbon emissions by 30 percent by its 10th year―a pace nearly seven times faster than the EPA plan.

Not only that, the McDermott bill taxes the carbon content of imports from non-taxing countries, protecting U.S. manufacturers from unfair competition while motivating other nations to tax their climate pollution. It taxes methane and other greenhouse gases at their CO2 climate-change equivalents. And it returns every dollar of tax revenues to individuals as pro rata dividends—a simple but profound design that just might placate conservatives and other fiscal hawks. This “fee and dividend” revenue treatment will buffer two-thirds of U.S. households, including most low-income families, from the energy price increases the tax will entail. (Rep. John Larson’s America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act of 2014 also specifies a robustly rising, revenue-neutral emissions tax.)

If the biggest block to game-changing climate legislation has been the fossil fuel-funded denialist movement, the timidity of climate advocates about carbon taxing may qualify as the runner-up. But as yesterday’s big march in New York City showed, the climate movement is rising and the American public may finally be stirring. Time is dreadfully short. Whatever qualms we’ve had about the t-a-x word must yield to opportunity and reality.

One Cheer for a New “Cap-and-Dividend” Bill

July 30, 2014 By Charles Komanoff

If you believe that the best policy for cutting U.S. carbon emissions — and the easiest political sell — is “cap-and-dividend,” you’re loving a NY Times op-ed keyed to a bill being introduced today by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).

Van Hollen’s Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2014 would (i) create a permit system covering CO2 emissions for all fossil fuels extracted or brought into the U.S., (ii) auction off permits equaling U.S. emissions in 2005, (iii) ratchet down the number of permits by 80% by 2050, and (iv) distribute all of the proceeds “to the American people as equal dividends for every woman, man and child,” according to the op-ed, entitled The Carbon Dividend.

CTC finds that a 100% carbon-dividend will improve finances for 65% of U.S. households, not for 80%.

A bill structured like that is fairly ambitious, and it’s good to see it submitted to Congress alongside the McDermott Managed Carbon Price Act of 2014 introduced two months ago on May 28. (Our write-up of the McDermott bill is here.) And the Times op-ed, by U-Mass economics professor James Boyce, is written with unusual grace and persuasiveness, especially at the start:

From the scorched earth of climate debates a bold idea is rising — one that just might succeed in breaking the nation’s current political impasse on reducing carbon emissions. That’s because it would bring tangible gains for American families here and now.

A major obstacle to climate policy in the United States has been the perception that the government is telling us how to live today in the name of those who will live tomorrow. Present-day pain for future gain is never an easy sell. And many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that smells like bigger government.

What if we could find a way to put more money in the pockets of families and less carbon in the atmosphere without expanding government? If the combination sounds too good to be true, read on.

That’s terrific writing, and smartly keyed to the compelling theme that climate policy need not be sacrificial or a greased path to so-called big government. [Read more…]

On the Latest Distraction from Carbon-Taxing: “Carbon Budgets”

July 8, 2014 By Charles Komanoff

Over the Fourth of July holiday, Lorna Salzman forwarded me half-a-dozen emails about “global carbon budgets” that had been posted to an informal list-serve of U.S. and U.K. climate advotes. Lorna and I have been friends and colleagues since 1974; she may have been the first person to take seriously my interest in carbon taxing, circa 2003, and her encouragement had a lot to do with my starting the Carbon Tax Center several years later and more recently to my ramping up my involvement in CTC. This morning I posted the following response.

I have four points:

1. I’m flat-out befuddled by the interest from some in this group in “carbon budgets,” whether national, global or whatnot. I think they’re a dead end politically as well as a dodge scientifically.

The author, 40 miles from his lower-Manhattan home (2012 photo).

Why a dead end? Because nations cannot and will not agree on who should be allowed to consume and emit how much carbon pollution. Because devilish “details” like offshoring will inevitably confound any negotiations. Ditto, population growth, which will require continual dynamic adjustments to national shares.

Why a dodge? Because every link in the emissions-to-catastrophe chain is riven with uncertainty. We don’t know with great precision what level of emissions will lead to any level of warming. We don’t know what level of warming will be catastrophic. There isn’t even agreement on what “catastrophe” is.

What we can agree on is that (i) any feasible level of emission reduction is insufficient, and (ii) deeper reductions are better than shallow ones. These facts are irreconcilable with carbon budgets.

2. A carbon tax must be at the center of any effective policy to rein in emissions. It’s folly to think that regulations (even enlightened ones) and/or clean-energy subsidies (even efficient ones) and/or public-sector mobilization such as by the Allies to win World War II can ever push back comprehensively against the massive tide of cheap fossil fuels (that is: cheap sans a price for their climate damage). [Read more…]

Thank You

Great! You’ve just taken a step towards being part of the movement for real climate solutions.

We’ll keep you posted periodically via e-mail. We also use Twitter for more frequent sharing, analysis and updates—often just as news is breaking.

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Regards,

Charles Komanoff

Carbon Tax Center

Contact

We welcome your questions, suggestions, constructive criticisms. If you’re a journalist on deadline, call Charles Komanoff at 212-260-5237. All others, please write us at info@carbontax.org, and we’ll write back soon. We’d love to hear from you.

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Carbon Tax Effectiveness

Estimated CO2 Reductions from a Briskly Rising Carbon Tax

The Carbon Tax Center long considered Rep. James McDermott’s “Managed Carbon Price Act,” one of the two most effective climate measures ever introduced in Congress. (The other, the “America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act” introduced in 2009 and re-introduced in 2015 by Rep. John B. Larson, chair of the House Democratic Caucus and fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, had a similar price and ramp-up and therefore a similar emissions reduction profile.) The bill by McDermott, a staunch Democrat who represented Washington’s 7th congressional district from 1989 to 2017, would have established a national carbon tax starting at a rate of $12.50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, rising annually by the same $12.50/metric ton.

We estimated that the carbon tax levels mandated under the McDermott bill would have reduced U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion by 1/3 within a decade. Using our 8-sector carbon-tax-model spreadsheet, we projected that the bill would have led to the progression of emission reductions shown in the graph below:

U.S. CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels would decline by 1/3 in the first decade after enactment of Rep. McDermott’s measure, according to projections by CTC. The middle curve, included for comparison, shows emissions if the carbon tax is set at the “social cost of carbon.”

Discussion

Carbon taxes embody the principle that truthful prices for fossil fuels must include the “externality costs” that their burning imposes on society, i.e., that polluters should pay for the damage caused by polluting. Briskly increasing carbon taxes will instill in energy consumers and producers strong incentives to efficiently reduce their use of fossil fuels and the attendant emissions of carbon dioxide while increasing efficiency and shifting to renewable energy.

The “supply-side response” will materialize largely through investment — for example, in carbon-free wind or solar power farms or lower-carbon gas-fired generating plants, or possibly in low-carbon biofuels. The “demand-side” response will arise in literally millions of decisions, ranging from the choice of car to drive (in multi-car households) to longer-term location decisions of families, businesses and institutions, all reflecting the fact that usage is at least somewhat sensitive to price, i.e., there is some “price-elasticity” (to use economic jargon) in energy usage.

To capture these responses quantitatively, CTC has developed an 8-sector National Carbon Tax Model, which we update every year or two. The model captures both demand- and supply-side responses to carbon taxes and incorporates time lags in end-users’ responses to the tax-induced higher prices. It divides U.S. CO2 emissions into seven sectors: electricity, which in 2015 accounted for 37% of nationwide CO2 emissions; personal ground travel, accounting for 22% (almost entirely from burning gasoline); freight (goods movement), 9%, largely diesel fuel for trucks; jet fuel for air travel (4%), oil refining (6%), other petroleum (also 6%), natural gas other than for electricity (11%), and, an eighth “sector,” miscellany (5%).

We apply separate long-run demand price-elasticities — 70% for electricity, 35% for gasoline, 60% for jet fuel, and 40-50% for the other sectors — with further assumptions for supply-side substitution of carbon as well. (All assumptions are detailed in the spreadsheet; users may input their own. Readers interested in the carbon contents of electricity and various fuels may also wish to examine our Carbon Contents spreadsheet.)

As configured in the file version, the model assumes an initial (year-2016) carbon tax of $12.50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, ramped up each year by the same $12.50 per metric ton (so that the tax level in the tenth year is $125 per metric ton of CO2, which equates to $113.40 per short ton, for example). The model indicates that such a carbon tax would, by 2026, result in U.S. CO2 emissions falling 31-32% below today’s baseline projections for 2026, and 41% below actual CO2 emissions in 2005. Also strikingly, the carbon tax provided in the McDermott bill would cause U.S. petroleum consumption in 2026 to be 26% less than 2005 actual consumption and 19% below 2026 projected consumption (without a carbon tax).

Notes on Price Elasticity

Price-Elasticity Curve _ minimalist _ 10 Feb 2016 Demand price-elasticity denotes the extent to which rises in price engender a drop in demand. A price-elasticity of 50% means that the drop in demand is half as steep as the price rise. Thus, a 2% increase in price would be required to engender a 1% decrease in demand. Importantly, for large price increases such as we propose over time, the drops in demand would be proportionately less, reflecting the law of diminishing returns. And at the same time the phased-in tax is causing prices of fossil fuels to rise, incomes would be rising, offsetting some of the reductions.

Because many if not most determinants of energy use such as infrastructure, location and capital goods like houses and cars can’t be changed overnight, drops in demand due to higher prices can take years to materialize fully. Our elasticity estimates are “long-run” figures, requiring around a decade to manifest fully, as opposed to “short-run” elasticities that apply to rapid but smaller changes, i.e., within a year. Short-run elasticities also exist, of course, as everybody who hesitates before paying an increased price for a product is aware, but they are less than the long-run values.

In a 2015 blog post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes, we explored (and dispelled) some myths about price-elasticity and carbon taxes that are surprisingly widespread, even among veteran environmental advocates and analysts. It remains one of our most widely read posts, and we commend it to anyone seeking to understand how, why and how fast a carbon tax can be expected to cut carbon emissions.

Below we give links to articles and papers on energy price-elasticity in the United States. Some are for a general audience, some are technical. Many focus on automobiles and gasoline, the area of energy use that has been studied the most.

Resources for the Future working paper 23-11, Prest, Fell, Gordon & Conway, Estimating the Emissions Reductions from Supply-side Fossil Fuel Interventions, 2023. Belying the title’s supply-side emphasis, this paper contains an excellent compendium of recent research estimating demand elasticities in the U.S. and some other countries for gasoline and/or crude oil. It finds an average of (negative) 0.35 for crude oil’s elasticity. Though the authors’ assertion that gasoline’s demand elasticity should be double that for crude oil would imply 0.70 for gasoline, we believe that this assertion is somewhat simplistic, especially for the United States, where infrastructure, culture and policy inhibit demand adaptation. All things considered, we believe the paper’s conclusion supports a U.S. gasoline demand price-elasticity greater than 0.35 but not twice as great.
J.E. Hughes, C.R. Knittel, D. Sperling, Evidence of a Shift in the Short-Run Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand, 2006, National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors sifted 2001-2006 gasoline use data and found price-elasticity to be minuscule — just 4% in the short-run and, though they didn’t quantify it, not much greater in the long-run.
Kenneth Small & Kurt Van Dender, Fuel Efficiency and Motor Vehicle Travel: The Declining Rebound Effect, 2006, revised 2007 (a shorter version was published in Energy Journal in 2007). Small, a Professor of Economics at U-C Irvine and a peerless transportation economist and thinker, co-authored the most perceptive and persuasive analysis of U.S. gasoline demand we’ve seen. The paper analyzed 1966-2001 data for each of the 50 states and found (i) a short-run price elasticity of gasoline of roughly 9% (comprised equally of changes in fuel efficiency and miles driven); and (ii) a long-run price elasticity of gasoline of around 40% (also arising equally from changes in fuel efficiency and miles driven). Note: Prof. Small told us that adding more recent data through 2004 doesn’t alter these findings.
J.E. Hughes, C.R. Knittel, D. Sperling, Evidence of a Shift in the Short-Run Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand, 2006, National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors sifted 2001-2006 gasoline use data and found price-elasticity to be minuscule — just 4% in the short-run and, though they didn’t quantify it, not much greater in the long-run.
C. Komanoff, Komanoff letter to Sperling. In a letter sent in December 2006, CTC’s Komanoff asked Prof. Sperling to reconcile his findings above with the contrary findings of Small & Van Dender.
Nicholas Lutsey & Daniel Sperling, Energy Efficiency, Fuel Economy, and Policy Implications, Transportation Research Record, 2005. Though not strictly about price elasticity, this paper deconstructed technical changes in the U.S. auto fleet from 1975 to the early 1980s, a period in which most technical gains were devoted to improving fuel efficiency, and since then, when technical improvements were used “to satisfy private desires (more power, size and amenities).” Anyone seeking to understand automobile fuel economy should read this paper.
Dermot Gately & Hillard G. Huntington, The Asymmetric Effects of Changes in Price and Income on Energy and Oil Demand, 2001, Economic Research Reports, RR# 2001-01, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, NYU. Using 1971-1997 data, and lumping the U.S. with the other (OECD) industrial nations, the authors derived long-run price-elasticities of only 24% for all energy, but 64% for petroleum products alone. (Could fuel substitution be the reason for the disparity?) Encouragingly, they reported a relatively low long-run income-elasticity, 55-60%, for both oil and energy in the OECD countries, indicating that, all things equal (i.e., with constant prices), each 3% growth of GDP gives rise to less than a 2% rise in energy use.

We invite CTC friends and visitors to comment on these materials and to suggest further reading. In 2007 environmental journalist-activist Gar Lipow compiled a handy bibliography of some of the best studies on the price-elasticity of demand for energy. Gar’s summaries of nearly two dozen price-elasticity studies from the U.S. and around the world are an invaluable guide to this important subject.

We also recommend the overview of seven sets of integrated assessment model results presented in “Carbon Taxes to Achieve Emissions Targets, Insights From EMF-24” (Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, 2012) which concluded that a carbon price would need to rise briskly, to roughly $440/ton CO2 by 2050 to reduce U.S. emissions in that year by 80%. That’s a serious price trajectory, in line with CTC’s modeling results.

Implementation

With U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion currently (2022) hovering above 5 billion metric tons a year, even a midrange carbon tax of $50 per metric ton would generate on the order of $250 billion in annual revenue. The magnitude of this figure underscores the importance of designing and implementing a carbon tax carefully and skillfully.

Table 1 from Jan. 2017 Treasury Dept report noted in text.

Unsurprisingly, this subject has spawned a robust literature. Below, we summarize two excellent resources, from 2009 and 2015, written by pre-eminent experts in carbon tax policy and economics.

An even better starting point is the Jan. 2017) report by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, Methodology for Analyzing a Carbon Tax. It’s a superb and mercifully brief (28 pages) guide to the nuts and bolts of administering a carbon tax. The table at left is indicative of its detail. Download here (pdf).

The Design of a Carbon Tax (Gilbert Metcalf & David Weisbach, Harvard Environmental Law Review, 2009; 58 pp.). Here’s the article’s abstract:

We consider the design of a tax on greenhouse gas emissions for the United States. We consider three major issues: the tax rate (including the use of the revenues and rate changes over time), the optimal tax base, and international trade concerns.

We show that a well-designed carbon tax can capture about 80% of U.S. emissions by taxing only a few thousand taxpayers, and almost 90% with a modest additional cost. We recommend full or partial delegation of rate setting authority to an agency to ensure that rates reflect current information about the costs of carbon emissions and abatement. Adjustments should be made to the income tax to ensure that a carbon tax is revenue neutral and distributionally neutral.

Finally, we propose an origin-basis system for trade with countries that have an adequate carbon tax, and a system of border taxes for imports from countries without a carbon tax. We suggest a system that imposes presumptive border tax adjustments, but allows an individual firm to prove that a different rate should apply. The presumptive tax could be based on average emissions for production of the item by either the exporting country or the importing country.

Implementing a US Carbon Tax: Challenges and Debates, a 2015 book compiling articles from the economics literature covering a range of design and implementation issues, edited by Ian Parry, Adele Morris and Roberton C Williams III. Chapters cover these topics:

1. Carbon Taxes as Part of the Fiscal Solution

2. Choosing among Mitigation Instruments: How strong is the case for a US carbon tax?

3. Administration of a US Carbon Tax

4. Carbon Taxes to Achieve Emissions Targets: Insights from EMF 24

5. Macroeconomic Effects of Carbon Taxes

6. The Distributional Burden of a Carbon Tax: Evidence and implications for policy

7. Offsetting a Carbon Tax’s Burden on Low-Income Households

8. Carbon Taxes and Corporate Tax Reform

9. Carbon Taxes and Energy-Intensive Trade-Exposed Industries: Impacts and options

10. The Role of Energy Technology Policy alongside Carbon Pricing

11. Mixing It Up: Power sector energy and regional and regulatory climate policies in the presence of a carbon tax

12. Implications of Carbon Taxes for Transportation Policies

See also:

What’s the best way to design a carbon tax? Brad Plumer (Washington Post, 3/13/12).
Putting a Price on Carbon, A Handbook for U.S. Policymakers (World Resources Institute, 2015).
Taxing Carbon: What, Why, and How (Tax Policy Center, Urban Institute & Brookings Institution, 2015).

Finally, the excerpts below from a 2007 memo from CTC to a House Ways & Means Committee member setting parameters for administering a federal carbon tax may be helpful.

Tax Upstream

We propose to tax fuels as far upstream as practicable, i.e., at the point where possession of the carbon-bearing fuel passes from the “producer” (e.g., coal mine; oil wellhead or tanker; gas wellhead) to the immediate next entity in the supply chain (e.g., coal shipper or utility; oil refiner or importer; natural gas pipeline). Presumably, each such transfer will be codified in a contract, or at least a bill of lading, specifying the attributes of the fuel.

This will minimize the number of points in the economy at which the tax would be levied. It will also simplify tax treatment of potential downstream carbon control technologies such as CCS (coal capture and sequestration), as discussed below.

Carbon Variability Requires Taxing by Btu, not by Fuel Weight or Volume

The tax rates will be stated in dollars per million Btu of heat content for each fuel. A more familiar approach based on physical quantities of fuel isn’t tenable, due to wide natural variations in carbon content within each fuel type. These variations are most stark for coal. A ton of lignite typically contains around 40% less carbon than a typical ton of bituminous coal, for example. To tax the two respective tons at the same dollar rate would be grossly unfair since combustion of the lignite ton releases 40% less carbon into the atmosphere than for the bituminous ton. Actual disparities would be even more pervasive and pronounced on account of variations in carbon content per ton within each major coal category (bituminous, subbituminous and lignite).

Fortunately, variations in carbon content of coals correspond fairly closely to variations in Btu content. This isn’t surprising, since it is the combustion of carbon into carbon dioxide that produces almost all of the heat energy released by burning any type of coal. Thus, lignite and bituminous coal differ by only 5% on average in carbon content per million Btu; differences in carbon per Btu among different batches of coals within the same category are probably less still.

Our approach, therefore, is to specify standard (and slightly different) tax rates for the three categories — bituminous, subbituminous and lignite — and to offer coal purchasers the option of applying for a lower tax rate than given in the standard schedule, on the basis of a coal assay performed and substantiated by a licensed, bonded entity, subject to random spot checks for accuracy.

Petroleum (Oil)

Taxing the carbon content of petroleum presents a different set of issues because of the dozen or more different petroleum products, each of which has its own carbon profile. For example, a barrel of residual fuel oil contains roughly 15% more carbon than a barrel of gasoline. This variability can be circumvented by (i) expressing the carbon tax for petroleum in the same terms as the tax for coal, i.e., in dollars per million Btu of heat content, and (ii) levying the carbon tax on crude oil as possession passes from the producer to the refiner or pipeline. (Where one company owns both entities in the transaction, the tax can be charged at the point of transfer from the producing “business unit” tothe refining or pipeline “arm.”) This approach has the added virtue of maximizing incentives to refrain from flaring and venting of carbon-bearing gases and liquids and thus to maximize energy outputs per unit of carbon emitted.

At the same time, however, the United States imports significant quantities — several million barrels per day, overall — of refined petroleum products such as gasoline, heating oil, residual fuel oil and jet fuel. Because each has a distinct carbon profile, it is advisable to establish individual product tax rates, also in dollars per million Btu of heat content, to apply to imports of petroleum products. (Crude oil imports would be taxed at the standard “domestic” crude tax rate.)

The assay option noted above for coal, whereby coal purchasers could apply for a lower tax rate on the basis of a certified assay, and again subject to random spot checks for accuracy, would also be available to oil pipelines and refiners.

(Note: the final memo will contain rates for another 8-10 petroleum products; each will be in the vicinity of the range shown here for gasoline, resid and crude.)

Natural Gas

Natural gas exhibits little variability in carbon content per million Btu of heat content, and thus one figure should suffice, with the assay option still available to cover special cases. [We will check to ensure that LNG arriving by tanker has the same carbon-to-energy ratio.] The tax would be charged at the wellhead in order to maximize incentives to refrain from flaring.

Rebates for CO2 Control

The bill should provide the opportunity for partial or total rebate of the tax payments if the paying entity can prove that some or all of the carbon dioxide emissions will be kept from entering Earth’s atmosphere for millenia. This rebate approach has several virtues:

* It provides fair and workable treatment of “partial combustion” which will vary by user and use (e.g., unburned coal in ash that is returned to the mine for underground disposal; possibly also cement manufacturing, and plastics manufacture).

* It creates positive incentives to minimize emissions.

* It puts the burden on the fuel producer to demonstrate emissions avoidance (as opposed to a partial tax which allows the producer to reduce taxes unilaterally and burdens the government with substantiating a rebuttal case).

Procedures for producer documentation of CO2 avoidance and/or sequestration will be spelled out in the next iteration of this memo.

Tax Rates

Following are tax rates consistent with charging $50.00 per ton of carbon (not carbon dioxide) emitted. Consistent with the intent of phasing this level in over a five-year period, the rates for years 1 through 4 would be calculated by multiplying the rates in the table by 20%, 40%, 60% and 80%, respectively.

These amounts are derived in a spreadsheet developed by Charles Komanoff.

All rates are expressed in dollars per million Btu of fuel.

Bituminous coal	$1.40
Subbituminous coal	$1.45
Lignite	$1.47
Crude Oil	$1.12
Gasoline	$1.07
Residual Fuel Oil	$1.18
Natural Gas	$0.80

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers about Carbon Taxes and the Carbon Tax Center

1. Who/what is the Carbon Tax Center?

CTC is a 501(c)3 non-profit that since 2007 has given voice to Americans who believe that taxing carbon pollution — the primary greenhouse gas — is imperative to reduce global warming. Co-founders Charles Komanoff and Dan Rosenblum brought to CTC a combined six decades of experience in economics, law, public policy and social change. CTC educates and informs policymakers, journalists and other opinion leaders, grassroots activists and the public about the need for significant, rising and equitable taxes on carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Though Dan has moved on, Charles remains as CTC director.

2. Why are carbon taxes essential?

The transformation of our fossil fuels-based energy system to reliance on energy efficiency, renewable energy and sustainable fuels won’t happen fast enough without carbon fees or taxes sending the appropriate persistent and rising price signals into every corner of the economy and every aspect of life. Or, in the words of Brookings economist (and carbon tax supporter) Adele Morris, “As long as burning dirt (i.e., fossil fuels) is the cheapest form of energy, that’s what we’ll do.” Conversely, raising fossil fuel prices with carbon taxes will motivate switches to clean energy across the economy by making it more economically rewarding to move to non-carbon fuels and energy efficiency.

3. How serious is the climate crisis?

We agree with pioneering climate-scientist James Hansen that the continued buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere has begun causing cataclysmic change in our planet’s climate and ecology. Denialists’ claims that global temperatures are receding are blatantly false; new records are set almost monthly, and both 2016 and 2015 smashed prior records (see graphic). Nor just sweltering summers but forest fires and die-off, drowned coastal regions, decimated food chains, spreading disease, economic devastation, warfare and massive migrations of humans and other species are all virtual certainties in the lifetimes of many people now living, unless the world makes sharp cuts in greenhouse gases.

4. How much of greenhouse gas emissions are from fossil fuel burning?

For the U.S., carbon dioxide released by burning oil, coal and natural gas makes up 82% of total greenhouse gas emissions (weighted by climate-change impact), according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The remainder is methane (9%, from landfills, coal mines, oil and gas operations and agriculture); nitrous oxide (5%, from burning fossil fuels and from certain fertilizers); refrigerants and other “engineered” chemicals (2%); and carbon dioxide from other sources (2%).

5. What is the U.S. share of world greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning?

The U.S. slipped behind China as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, a decade ago. Nevertheless, the U.S. still accounts for nearly 20% of the world’s CO2 emissions from fuel-burning. Because Americans are less than 5% of world population, per capita we emit almost 5 times as much CO2 as the average non-American. The historical disparity is even greater, and because CO2 molecules persist in Earth’s atmosphere for around a century, our past emissions are disproportionately responsible for climate change now and in the future. On any moral calculus, the United States bears a heavy responsibility to cut emissions massively and rapidly.

6. Why does CTC support carbon tax shifting?

The potential carbon tax burden on low and moderate-income households can be averted by returning the tax proceeds to Americans. This can be done through periodic pro rata “dividends” or by reducing the tax burden of regressive taxes such as the federal payroll tax or state sales taxes (depending upon whether the tax is imposed at the federal or state level). Shifting the tax burden to pollution and pollution-generating activities will create powerful incentives to use less energy and emit less CO2 while simultaneously promoting tax equity and minimizing the impact of the carbon tax on those with lower incomes.

7. Why should we CTC support both carbon taxes and energy-efficiency standards?

Energy standards have improved energy performance by forcing product design changes in critical sectors such as major appliances and U.S.-made automobiles, as we noted in one of our most popular blog posts. Standard-setting takes a long time, however. Moreover, standards tend to be static whereas energy use is ever-evolving. Combining carbon taxes with efficiency standards will achieve far more than the latter alone by motivating manufacturers and builders to proactively maximize energy efficiency while giving consumers ongoing incentives to make cost-effective choices valuing efficiency in shopping, traveling and purchase of homes and other durables.

8. Why not just subsidize renewables?

Federal payments to wind generators for each kWh produced, accelerated depreciation allowances for solar photovoltaic cells, and state “Renewable Portfolio Standards” mandating purchases use of renewable power have helped jump-start these sectors, bringing down costs and establishing renewables as culturally viable and politically salient. But energy efficiency is just as vital. Unfortunately, subsidizing efficiency is impracticable due to the distributed and dispersed nature of energy efficiency investments and choices. Moreover, a carbon tax will help wind and solar power speed their rise from their 3% niche (as of 2017, when wind + solar accounted for 8% of U.S. electricity) to a majority share of energy. (For a full exploration of these issues, read CTC’s Jan. 2014 Comments to the Senate Finance Committee.)

9. Why not just withdraw fossil fuel subsidies?

Of course we should zero out tax breaks, lease loopholes and other giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, along with the bloated and unsupportable ethanol mandate. But the impact on U.S. fossil fuel use would barely be noticeable. Authoritative sources such as EarthTrack have placed the fossil fuel industry’s tax and fiscal subsidies at around $25 billion a year, a figure that pales beside the roughly $1,000 billion (one trillion dollars) paid annually for coal, oil and natural gas burned in the U.S. Do the math: withdrawing those subsidies would lead to at most a 2-3 percent rise in the market prices of fossil fuels — scant incentive to reduce their use and concomitant emissions of CO2.

10. Why not just let market forces lift fuel prices?

Market signals are too volatile in the short term and too weak in the long term to provide the incentives needed to rewire the U.S. for energy efficiency and renewables. Moreover, high prices alone, whether due to geological depletion or plain old gouging, line the pockets (and magnify the political power) of the energy industry and ravage the poor and middle class. They’re even counter-productive, since high prices, absent a carbon tax, unleash production of CO2-intensive “extreme” fossil fuels from tar sands, mountaintop detonation, and fracking. Only carbon taxes combine market correctives with protecting American families and our environment.

11. Why not let technology remove carbon pollution from coal-fired smokestacks?

Rather than take positions on competing technologies, CTC works to remedy the market failure that allows burning of gas, oil and coal without charging for the resultant climate damage. Thus, we neither favor nor oppose so-called “clean coal,” i.e., combustion of coal with carbon dioxide captured and sequestered from the atmosphere; though we’re not bullish on Carbon Capture and Storage in light of the considerable (~30-40%) oversizing of generating capacity and coal throughput required to process flue gas to safely remove 90% or more of the CO2. In any event, every serious carbon tax proposal has a provision to credit working CCS systems via a rebate or netback for CO2 demonstrably sequestered from release to the atmosphere.

12. Will a carbon tax lessen U.S. oil dependence?

You bet. Petroleum products account for around 45% of U.S. CO2 emissions from burning fuels (coal and natural gas are responsible for roughly 25% and 30%, respectively), so a carbon tax stiff enough to cut down heavily on CO2 will necessarily put a big dent in oil consumption. According to our own modeling, Rep. Larson’s bill would, by its tenth year in effect, reduce U.S. use of petroleum by nearly 20% below “business-as-usual” levels (i.e., without a carbon tax or equivalent price on carbon emissions).

13. Would taxing carbon be regressive?

Any flat tax is regressive, but the regressivity of a tax on carbon pollution could and should be minimized or even reversed by making sure a fair share of tax revenues flow to the less affluent. The key is that wealthier households use more energy, on average – they drive and fly more, have bigger (and sometimes multiple) houses, and buy more stuff that requires energy to manufacture and use. A majority of carbon tax revenues will come from families of above-average means, which creates a basis for “progressive tax-shifting”: transferring a portion of the tax burden from regressive taxes such as the payroll tax (at the federal level) and the sales tax (at the state level) onto pollution and pollution-generating activities. Another progressive approach is to rebate the carbon tax revenues equally to all U.S. residents — a national version of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which for decades has annually sent identical checks to all state residents from earnings on investments made with the state’s North Slope oil royalties. Because income and energy consumption are strongly correlated, most poorer households will get more back in rebates or tax savings than they pay out in the carbon tax. The Citizens Climate Lobby is the leading proponent of this “fee-and-dividend” approach.

14. How can impacts on poor families be lessened?

Impacts of carbon taxes on poor families can be lessened by: 1) progressive tax-shifting as just described; 2) pro-rata distribution of the carbon tax revenues to every U.S. resident (also described above); and/or 3) to the extent necessary, funding programs designed to help poorer households use less energy driving and at home. See Offsetting a Carbon Tax’s Costs on Low-Income Households (Congressional Budget Office, 2012).

15. How much revenue will carbon taxes generate?

A lot, if taxes on carbon pollution rise briskly enough to have the needed climate impacts. Rep. Larson’s bill would start modestly at $15 per ton of CO2. That $15 per ton CO2 tax would bring in $80 billion of revenue, which equates to around $250 per U.S. resident, or $1,000 for a family of four. (Thus, if carbon revenue are distributed as per capita “dividends,” that family receives $1,000. If that family uses less fossil fuel energy than average, their increased costs will be less than $1,000, so they’ll come out ahead.) Successive annual carbon tax increments adding $12.50 per ton will add to the annual revenue stream, though at a declining rate as CO2 emissions fall each year in response to the rising CO2 price. By the end of the tenth year, the annual revenue will be on the order of $440 billion. We estimate that this brisk rise in the cost of CO2 pollution will reduce U.S. emissions dramatically, by about 1/3.

16. How will carbon taxes be administered?

The tax will be levied at the wholesale level of the fuel supply chain, as far upstream as practicable. Electric generators will pay the mandated carbon tax to their coal or natural gas suppliers, who will forward the payment to the government; the generators will pass along the tax to the retail electric utility which in turn will charge it to customers – to the extent that market conditions allow. Similarly for petroleum products (e.g., gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil), with government collecting the tax from refiners or importers of refined petroleum products, and the taxes passed on to oil wholesalers and eventually to retail customers. This approach will maximize accuracy and incentives and minimize paperwork and leakage.

About 1,200 to 1,500 fossil fuel energy producers will pay carbon taxes. According to Jack Calder of EPA, whose paper “Administration of a U.S. Carbon Tax” forms Chapter 3 of “Implementing a US Carbon Tax: Challenges and Debates,” approximately 150 petroleum refineries, 500 – 800 coal producers (depending on the point of compliance) and about 500 natural gas distributors will be taxed. Gilbert Metcalf and David Weisbach offer more detail in The Design of a Carbon Tax (Harvard Environmental Law Rev, 2009). A January 2017 report from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, Methodology for Analyzing a Carbon Tax, is a superb (and mercifully brief, just 28 pages) guide to the nuts and bolts of administering a carbon tax.

17.Will carbon tax “dividends” be subject to federal income taxes?

It is likely that the carbon dividends (periodic payouts to households or individuals under a fee-and-dividend system) will count as taxable income. But the additional federal revenue from the taxes received on the dividend income could be added back to the dividend pool being divvied up and returned to households, thus preserving revenue-neutrality.

It is true that this will add a step or two to the Treasury’s bookkeeping; and that it would alter somewhat the distributive patterns from a pure (untaxed) dividend system. The net effect will probably make fee-and-dividend even more income-progressive, since wealthy individuals and households tend to pay a higher percentage of their gross income as taxes than non-wealthy taxpayers.

18. How will carbon taxes handle carbon sequestration? Plastics? Petrochemicals?

Offsetting credit will be provided to the extent the carbon dioxide is actually sequestered, in order to eliminate any disincentive to sequestration. Releases of CO2 from converting fossil fuels to plastics or petrochemicals in non-combustion processes will be taxed at the same level as CO2 emitted in the production of energy or for transportation purposes.

19. Will a carbon tax apply to nuclear power?

A carbon tax will only be imposed on the use or combustion of carbon and the resulting emission of carbon dioxide. A carbon tax would not be imposed directly on the generation of nuclear power, though of course it would apply to any CO2 released in mining, enriching and transporting uranium, in other uses ancillary to the generation of nuclear power (such as fuel used for back-up generation), and in storing radioactive wastes.

20. How high should carbon taxes go? How fast should they climb?

While carbon taxes will need to be rise briskly to create the required price incentives, they will need to be phased in to give individuals and businesses the opportunity to adjust. There’s no magic formula or perfect number, but a tax that grows fast enough to reduce CO2 emissions by 1/3 within a decade probably offers a viable combination of meaningful incentive and opportunity for adaptation. The $15 per ton of CO2 “starter tax” mentioned earlier, equating to around 14 cents a gallon of gasoline, fits the lower end of that range. At least as important as the tax level is the commitment to keep raising the tax, preferably annually, so that energy-critical decisions, from car-buying (Hummer vs. Prius) to home-buying (exurb vs. transit-oriented community) to factory locating (highway interchange vs. rail line), are made with carbon-appropriate price signals.

21. Must carbon taxes be global to work?

Though carbon taxes can be applied locally, nationally or globally, the eventual goal is a global tax. Not only is the climate crisis global in both scope and solution, but a global carbon tax will avert potential leakage by carbon emitters attempting to move their combustion of carbon from countries that tax carbon to those that don’t. U.S. carbon tax legislation should include border tax adjustments to help protect domestic industry from unfair competition and to tax imports of other nations until they enact their own taxes on carbon pollution. Still, let’s not make perfection the enemy of the good; carbon pollution should be taxed wherever possible.

22. Why a carbon tax instead of a cap-and-trade system?

Carbon taxes are superior to cap-and-trade programs for seven fundamental reasons:

Carbon taxes will lend predictability to energy prices, whereas cap-and-trade systems will only exacerbate price volatility that discourages investments in carbon-reducing energy efficiency and carbon-replacing renewable energy.
Carbon taxes can be implemented more quickly than complex permit-based cap-and-trade systems.
Carbon taxes are transparent and easily understandable, making them more likely to elicit public support than opaque and complex cap-and-trade.
Carbon taxes aren’t easily manipulable by special interests, whereas the complexity of cap-and-trade leaves it rife for exploitation by the financial industry.
Carbon tax revenues can be more or less guaranteed and integrated into state or federal fiscal policy, owing to their predictability, whereas the price-volatility of cap-and-trade precludes its being counted on as a revenue source.
Carbon taxes are replicable across borders, since the price “metric” embodied in a carbon tax is far more universal than the quantity-reduction metric underlying cap-and-trade.
Perversely, cap-and-trade discourages voluntary/individual carbon reductions, since those cause a lowering of prices of emission permits which undercuts low-carbon investments; carbon taxes are free of this unintended negative consequence.

23. How responsive is energy demand to the price of fuels?

That varies with the type of fuel, the expected persistence of the price change, and the availability of substitutes. The two forms of energy that economists have studied most intensively are gasoline (which in 2014 accounted for 20% of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide) and electricity (39%). From our own micro-economic analyses as well as a literature review, CTC believes a “price-elasticity” of 35% (or negative 0.35, in the jargon) is an appropriate assumption for gasoline demand, and 70% for electricity. These assumptions mean that drops in demand are less steep than rises in the fuel price but are still substantial. For all other fuel uses, ranging from diesel fuel for trucks and jet fuel for planes to home heating and industrial fuels — the overall price-responsiveness is probably greater than for gasoline but less than for electricity. (See more detailed discussion on our “Effectiveness” page.)

These estimates are “long-run” elasticities, meaning that price rises take years to fully affect demand. Households and businesses can’t overnight adjust their stocks of energy-using equipment (cars, major appliances, office layouts, etc.), nor can they instantly adapt location decisions that determine distances that people and goods travel. On the other hand, carbon taxes and the resulting relative rises in fossil fuel prices will induce reductions in carbon emission rates on the supply side. For example, higher coal prices due to carbon taxing will lead cost-minimizing power grids to more heavily dispatch lower-emitting natural gas power plants in the short run, and to switch increasingly to zero-carbon wind and solar generation over time.

24. What are the non-climate costs of using fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels burden human beings, communities and nature with enormous environmental and social damages apart from destabilizing climate. Chief among them are “traditional” air pollution such as car and truck exhaust and smokestack emissions; destruction of land and water from extracting and transporting fuels; and the militarism, economic inequality and political authoritarianism that is endemic to extractive economies (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia). Many researchers believe the magnitude of these and other “indirect” costs exceeds the “market” prices paid for coal, oil and gas.

25. What are the ancillary benefits of taxing carbon?

As the previous Q&A suggests, U.S. carbon taxes will deliver vast non-climate benefits by discouraging use of fossil fuels. These will range from better air quality and less strip-mining to reduced entanglement in the unstable and dangerous Middle East and a less powerful fossil fuel industry. Americans can also look forward to a slew of indirect benefits – for example, lighter road traffic arising from a decrease in vehicle-miles traveled, as families and businesses adapt to higher gasoline and diesel fuel prices by trimming their least essential trips and consolidating others.

26. Who favors carbon taxes?

Carbon taxes are supported by a diverse group of opinion leaders, pundits, scientists and economists. The task now is to broaden and deepen support for taxing carbon among both the political elites and the grassroots – and to do so in the face of concerted opposition from fossil fuel interests determined to preserve (and increase!) their sales rather than watch their sector, and profits, shrink as the carbon tax steadily diminishes sales and use of coal, oil and gas.

27. How have past fuel tax efforts fared in the U.S.?

Poorly. The idea of taxing energy to better reflect its full costs collides with Americans’ historical entitlement to cheap energy and the anti-tax ideology of the past 35 years, not to mention the political muscle of the fossil fuel industry. This triad helped kill the last big effort to tax energy — President Clinton’s Btu tax in 1993. Nevertheless, we’re optimistic that making the carbon tax revenue-neutral, with all revenue recycled via tax-shifting or returned via carbon tax dividends, can soften resistance. Indeed, as described in the next Q&A, polls now point to strong support for a revenue-neutral tax designed to combat climate change.

28. What does polling indicate about carbon taxes?

Poll-Graphic-Pie-Chart-Alt

Opinion polls increasingly find Americans grasping the need to address climate change and warming (oops) to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A January 2015 poll by political scientists at Stanford University and Resources for the Future found that two-thirds of Americans support making corporations pay a price for carbon pollution, provided the revenues are redistributed, i.e., made revenue-neutral. (See graphic at left.)

More recently, in March 2016, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans polled told Gallup’s annual environmental poll that they are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming. That figure is up from 55% in March 2015 and is the highest reading since 2008, according to Gallup. (See graphic below.)

Gallup _ U.S. Concern About Global Warming at Eight-Year High _ annotated _ 18 March 2016 Other results from the 2016 Gallup poll are equally striking. They show a record-high share of Americans stating that climate change poses a threat to them and their way of life; a record number agreeing that climate change is caused primarily by human activity; and climate concern climbing across the political spectrum.

There’s more about these two polls as well as earlier ones on our page on opinion polling.

29. What will a carbon tax look like to me?

On the one hand, just about everything requiring fossil fuels, from a drive in the country to imported produce, will cost more, with prices rising the most for activities or goods that use the most fossil fuels. But the upside is three-fold: (i) your tax reduction or dividend check will offset much, perhaps more than 100%, of those price increases; (ii) you’ll be able to minimize your tax bite by cutting down on fuel usage (e.g., shortening those country drives, buying locally-grown produce, purchasing “green power” from wind and solar cells); and (iii) Americans’ combined behavior changes in response to the carbon tax will go a long way toward protecting the climate and averting the cataclysmic consequences of unchecked global warming.

30. Who’s taxing carbon now?

See our Where Carbon Is Taxed page. Or, download Sightline Institute’s excellent 2014 report, All the World’s Carbon Pricing Systems in One Animated Map, with maps tracing the institution (and, in at least one instance, Australia, the rescission) of carbon taxing worldwide, as well as carbon pricing administered via cap-and-trade programs. The Sightline report includes helpful tables, too.

The most notable carbon tax in the Western Hemisphere remains that in British Columbia. Carbon dioxide emissions from that province, Canada’s third most populous, began to be taxed on July 1, 2008 at a rate of $10 (Canadian) per metric ton and were raised annually to reach the current rate of $30 per metric ton (which equates to just over 20 U.S. dollars per U.S. ton). (We assessed BC’s carbon tax in a December 2015 report.) Voters in Boulder (Colorado) passed a carbon tax referendum in 2006; while Boulder’s tax equates to just $7/ton and applies only to electricity, it nonetheless establishes an important precedent: the first climate-protecting tax ever levied in the United States. Citizens in Washington State and five other states are campaigning to enact statewide carbon taxes.

31. What’s the political strategy for winning carbon taxes?

An effective campaign for carbon taxes must be both intellectually sound and politically palatable. The key point: Taxing climate pollution is economically and morally preferable to taxing productive activity such as work, savings or investment. Instead of discouraging productive effort, initiative and investment as other tax burdens do, a tax on carbon pollution raises the cost of harmful activity and thereby encourages efficiency and renewable energy. Revenues from carbon taxes can fund “dividends” to all U.S. residents or be used to reduce existing taxes, shifting tax burdens onto pollution and pollution-generating activities. Framing taxes on carbon pollution as an embodiment of the “polluter pays” principle unites interests as diverse as environmental-justice advocates, free-market conservatives and classical economists. Sound design of the revenue side of carbon tax legislation will also ensure that people of limited means, who use less energy than average, are made better off, not worse.

32. What can I do to advance carbon taxes?

The big need now is to develop grassroots support for a carbon tax. Start talking about a tax on climate pollution at your local environmental, religious or civic group meetings. Subscribe to CTC’s occasional but timely emails by filling in the sign-up pop-up box on our home page. Join Citizens Climate Lobby, the vital and committed nationwide network of activists that is putting the revenue-neutral carbon tax known as “fee-and-dividend” (delightfully explained in CCL’s 2-minute video) on the policy map. And please donate to the Carbon Tax Center, via our on-line Donate page. It’s contributions from people like you that enable us to conduct research, work on advocacy, and share knowledge and hope on carbon taxing. Thank you.

Revenue-Neutral: Yes or No?

A “robust” carbon tax — one high enough to significantly change fuel incentives, drive innovation and transform our energy system and culture — is going to generate large amounts of revenue.

Fossil-fuel burning in the U.S. now (pre-pandemic, 2019) emits around 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. A carbon tax set at the threshold of robustness — $50 per metric ton — would generate roughly $250 billion a year in new tax proceeds. That’s a significant figure by any measure. It equates to 6-7 percent of total U.S. tax proceeds (currently $3.86 trillion). Spread among the country’s 128.5 million households (as of 2017), it’s $1,950 a year.

Not surprisingly, “what to do with the carbon tax revenue” is the most contentious issue surrounding carbon tax proposals, especially for possible carbon taxes at the federal level where the tax rate could be higher and political divisions are starker.

Revenue-Neutral Carbon-Taxing

Revenue-neutral means that government retains little if any of the tax revenues raised by taxing carbon emissions. Instead, the revenues are returned to the public; with, perhaps, small amounts utilized to assist communities dependent on fossil-fuel extraction and processing to adapt and convert to low- or non-carbon economies.

There are two overlapping but nonetheless disparate reasons for structuring a carbon tax to be revenue-neutral.

One is to appeal to (or appease) voters and elected officials who claim to abhor government and thus don’t want to swell its coffers.

The other is to counter or at least minimize the natural regressivity of carbon taxes by returning revenue in a way that protects the less affluent, while preserving the tax’s price-incentive to reduce emissions. (Keep in mind that wealthier households use more energy, since they generally drive and fly more, have bigger (and sometimes multiple) houses, and buy more stuff that requires energy to manufacture and use.)

There are two primary approaches to returning or recycling the tax revenues.

One approach, discussed below in detail, returns revenues directly through regular (e.g., monthly) “dividends” to all U.S. households or residents. Every resident or household receives an equal, identical slice of the total carbon revenue “pie.” In this approach, which adherents at Citizens Climate Lobby call fee-and-dividend, each individual’s carbon tax is proportional to his or her fossil fuel use, creating an incentive to reduce; but everyone’s dividend is equal and independent of his or her usage, preserving the conservation incentive. Alaska’s dividend program has provided residents with annual allotments from the state’s North Slope oil royalties for three-and-a-half decades.

In the other revenue-return method, each dollar of carbon tax revenue triggers a dollar’s worth of reduction in existing taxes such as the federal payroll tax or corporate income tax — or, on the state level, sales taxes. As carbon-tax revenues are phased in (with the tax rates rising steadily but not too steeply, to allow a smooth transition), existing taxes are phased out. While this “tax-shift” is less direct than the dividend method, it too ensures that the carbon tax is revenue-neutral. It offers other important benefits, as well; for example, reducing payroll taxes could stimulate employment.

To repeat: each individual’s receipt of dividends or tax-shifts is independent of the carbon taxes he or she pays. That is, no person’s benefits are tied to his or her energy consumption and carbon tax “bill.” This separation of benefits from payments preserves the carbon tax’s incentive to reduce use of fossil fuels and emit less CO₂ into the atmosphere. (Of course, it would be extraordinarily cumbersome to calculate an individual’s full carbon tax bill since to some extent the carbon tax would be passed through as part of the costs of various goods and services.)

Revenue-neutrality not only protects the poor, it’s also politically savvy since it offers a way to blunt the “No New Taxes” demand that has held sway in American politics for decades. Returning the carbon tax revenues to the public would also make it easier to raise the tax level over time, a point made nicely by McGill University professor Christopher Ragan in a 2008 Montreal Gazette op-ed, and subsequently borne out by the experience in British Columbia where a revenue-neutral carbon tax was ramped up in four annual increments; that tax remains politically popular and is driving down emissions.

In any event, either of the two “revenue return” approaches — carbon dividends and tax-shifting — can make carbon taxes income-progressive. Because income and energy consumption are strongly correlated, most poor households will get more back in their carbon dividends or via tax-shifting than they will pay in the carbon tax. The overall effect of a carbon tax could thus be equitable and even “progressive” (benefiting lower-earning households).

Revenue-Positive Carbon-Taxing (Investing in Alternatives)

It may seem axiomatic that carbon-tax revenues should fund renewable energy or efficiency upgrades. And that approach always polls well, making it politically attractive.

Nevertheless, climate and energy realities indicate that only a robustly-rising carbon tax can deliver the deep and broad CO2 emission reductions needed to avert climate disaster. Building public support and maintaining the fairness needed for such a substantial carbon tax can most easily be done if all or nearly all of the carbon-tax revenue is returned to taxpayers. See “Making a carbon tax income-progressive” and our blog post: “Which Carbon Tax: Robust or Miniature? (July 7, 2013)”

Dividends

(a/k/a Carbon Dividends or “Green Checks”)

One revenue treatment that is both income-progressive and appealingly straightforward is to return the revenues equally to all U.S. residents. This so-called “dividend” would be a national version of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which since the 1970s has annually sent all state residents identical checks drawn from earnings on investments made with the state’s North Slope oil royalties. (For a federal carbon tax, the “dividend” checks should be provided quarterly or monthly to keep households ahead of the budget treadmill.)

The dividend approach was so attractive and elegant that the nation’s most energetic and active advocacy organization for carbon taxes has organized around it. That’s the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which calls its approach carbon fee-and-dividend.

Fee-and-dividend explained, Canadian style. Hat tip to @scottsantens.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say (and important to acknowledge) that by 2018, the second year of the Trump administration, fee-and-dividend has run out of political room. Not a single “sitting” (i.e., still in office) Republican member of Congress has publicly endorsed fee-and-dividend, even as a concept, let alone an actual bill. Yet the premise of fee-and-dividend has always been bipartisanship, since Democrats, with their preference for activist government, would accept a revenue-neutral carbon tax such as fee-and-dividend only if it delivered Republican votes.

For a decade, we wrote glowingly about fee and dividend — most recently in 2017 articles in The Nation and the Washington Spectator. We also praised the Climate Leadership Council’s “carbon dividend” proposal and advocacy in those two pieces and in numerous blogs (here, here, and here, inter alia). But as we wrote in June 2018, we believe that the time for carbon dividend proposals has probably passed. We wrote:

The [political] center to which Baker-Shultz (CLC) and fee-and-dividend (CCL) were designed to appeal barely exists. It’s not just that no sitting Republican has endorsed Baker-Shultz or indeed fee-and-dividend in any form. It’s also that the Democratic majority that will be needed to pass a carbon tax bill appears unlikely to rally around a revenue-neutral carbon tax, whether it’s organized as fee-and-dividend or some form of tax swap.

Economic Progressivity of Fee-and-Dividend

In 2016 CCL released a detailed paper examining how a carbon fee-and-dividend would impact U.S. households. The study took into account geographic variations in electricity sources and gasoline use and drew on a database of carbon intensity of expenditures for 5.8 million households to analyze the net effect of returning revenue to households on a modified per capita basis. Here are the major results:

Percentage of Households Benefitted, by Income Quintile

53% of households (and 58% of individuals) would receive more in dividend payments than they would spend due to higher fossil fuel prices.
Another 19% of households would incur only a slight loss, defined as a net loss no larger than one-fifth of one percent of pre-tax income.
Nearly 90% of households below the poverty line would benefit an average of $311, an increase of roughly 2.8% of pre-tax income.
In contrast, the net loss for the top quintile of households would average $-322 or only -0.18% of pre-tax income.

Notably, these findings support a dividend plan’s ability to transform a carbon tax into a progressive policy that neutralizes the burden that lower-income households would otherwise face, directly and indirectly, due to higher fuel prices. CTC advocates a progressive distributional outcome for both pragmatic and ethical reasons: pragmatically, because a carbon tax will require broad, sustained, public and political support; and ethically, because it’s not tenable to solve the climate crisis on the backs of those who can least afford it.

A Caveat — CBO’s “haircut”

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office routinely “scores” members’ bills for their prospective impact on tax revenues. To streamline its analyses, CBO long ago settled the so-called “CBO haircut” by which it assumes that one-quarter of indirectly raised revenues would need to be allocated from the tax proceeds in question in order to make up for reduced tax revenues collected from conventional sources such as personal or corporate income taxes. But modeling of carbon tax proposals consistently finds that when revenue is strategically returned by reducing other taxes that tend to slow down economic activity, the net negative impacts are much lower than CBO’s 25% assumption and in some cases may be eliminated altogether. While returning revenue as “dividends” (which economists call “lump-sum rebates”) offers less potential to reduce economic drag than tax shifts, CBO’s assumption still seems like an over-estimate.

In any event, rigid application of the 25% CBO haircut could, on paper at least — and, likely, in Congressional deliberations — limit the carbon tax revenue perceived to be available for “dividends” to 75%. Yet even with this reduced fraction of revenue, returning carbon tax revenue via a direct dividend represents a simple and income-progressive means to make carbon taxes distributionally fair; though with the haircut, the share of households reaping a net benefit via an equal 75% dividend would be lower than the 58% of individuals mentioned above.

Cogent opinion pieces by dividend proponent James K. Boyce (U-Mass, Amherst)

Does Biden’s insurance policy for the climate go far enough? (The Hill, 2/26/2021)
Carbon Dividends: The Bipartisan Key to Climate Policy? (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2/17/2017)
The Carbon Dividend (New York Times, July 29, 2014)

Tax-Shifting

The distribution of carbon tax burdens creates an opportunity for “progressive tax-shifting,” in which a portion of carbon tax revenue is dedicated to reducing regressive taxes such as the payroll tax (at the federal level) or sales taxes (at the state level). An early proponent of such a carbon tax shift was Al Gore, with his exhortation to “Tax what we burn, not what we earn.” Shifting taxes away from payroll and/or sales taxes and onto carbon pollution could raise, not lower, the after-tax incomes of a majority of below-median-income households, giving this approach a net progressive effect.

In addition to this potential progressive effect of tax shifting, a wide range of economists, [including Lawrence Goulder, Roberton Williams & Ian Parry, Gilbert Metcalf & David Weisbach, Alan Viard, Robert Shapiro, Donald Marron & Eric Toder] have concluded that use of revenue to reduce other taxes would improve the overall efficiency of the economy, for example, by removing burdens on work.

In October 2007, the Brookings Institution published a A Proposal for a U.S. Carbon Tax Swap — An Equitable Tax Reform to Address Global Climate Change by Tufts University economics professor Gilbert E. Metcalf, describing a national carbon tax paired with an income tax credit for payroll taxes paid. Metcalf assessed the impact of a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and five major greenhouse gases. Revenues would be used to credit payroll tax paid on the first $3,660 of earnings per worker. Metcalf showed that such a tax swap would be both revenue-neutral and distributionally-neutral. (Harvard professor and former Bush Administration economist Gregory Mankiw mentioned the Metcalf paper in a Sept. 2007 New York Times op-ed, discussed on our blog.) Rep. John Larson (D-CT) adopted Metcalf’s framework for his “America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act,” discussed on our Bills page.

More recent analysis has confirmed the importance of carbon tax revenue wisely; using it to reduce other “distortionary” taxes can offer large enough efficiency benefits to reduce or even possibly eliminate the economic drag that a carbon tax would otherwise create. In Deficit Reduction and Carbon Taxes: Budgetary, Economic, and Distributional Impacts (2013) researchers from Resources for the Future found that using carbon tax revenue to reduce corporate income tax rates offers large enough efficiency benefits to more than overcome the efficiency loss of a carbon tax. The next best option is using revenue to cut wage taxes, while using revenue to cutting other consumption taxes is somewhat less efficient. Finally, refunding carbon tax revenue in a “lump sum rebate” (dividend) offers the least economic efficiency benefit.

Reducing the top marginal corporate income tax rate has been articulated as a goal by leaders of both major political parties. In an effort to attract Republican interest, Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) has introduced a carbon tax measure that would devote half its revenue to corporate income tax reduction.

Nevertheless, the growing economics literature on carbon taxes suggests a strong a tradeoff between the efficiency benefits of using carbon tax revenue to cut taxes on capital (as the Delaney proposal would do) and the distributional benefits of cutting taxes on labor (as Rep. Larson’s proposal would).