Between 5 and 21% emission reductions: this is the empirically measured effect of carbon pricing systems in their first few years of operati
Between 5 and 21% emission reductions: this is the empirically measured effect of carbon pricing systems in their first few years of operation. A research team now identifies these findings for 17 real-world climate policies around the globe, condensing the state of knowledge more comprehensively than ever. The team uses artificial intelligence to collate existing surveys, making them comparable using a novel calculation concept.
The major meta-study was led by the Berlin-based climate research institute MCC (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change) and published in the journal Nature Communications.
If tax cuts give you $100 back in your wallet yet it gives the rich, $10,000 back in theirs, you are not $100 richer. Money is relative to wealth. When we give handouts or tax breaks and most of it goes to the rich YOU. GET. POORER. Tax the rich, don't just cut carbon taxes.
Canada's national carbon price saw its largest hike yet on Saturday when it jumped from $50 per tonne of emissions to $65. But the rebates m
Canada's national carbon price saw its largest hike yet on Saturday when it jumped from $50 per tonne of emissions to $65. But the rebates millions of households receive to compensate them for the surcharge are also set to rise.
Usually, the national price increases annually by $10. This year, under the federal government's strengthened climate plan, it's rising by $15.
Because carbon pricing differs from province to province and territory to territory, not everyone will feel the impact of this increase the same way.
Researchers propose a new kind of carbon price that would reduce the burden of carbon clean-up on future generations.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
In a 2016 paper, climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues wrote that delaying mitigation today with the idea that we can fix the climate later “sentences young people to either a massive, implausible cleanup or growing deleterious climate impacts or both.”
For Johannes Bednar, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, one of the biggest problems with this prospective future clean-up job is that there won’t be any way to pay for it.
“If we don’t have a plan right now what to do in the future, then we can be pretty sure that we won’t be achieving the Paris Agreement temperature goal,” said Bednar. “We need a strategy, and we can’t wait.”
Bednar and his colleagues have a novel proposal for addressing this issue, which they describe in a paper published in the journal Nature on Thursday. It lays out a way to tie every ton of CO2 emitted, starting now, to a party responsible for cleaning it up later through a financial tool called a Carbon Removal Obligation, or CRO. You can think of a CRO as a carbon debt, or IOU. One way they might work would be for a country’s central bank to issue a controlled amount of CROs to private banks. Polluting companies would then obtain those CROs as an option for complying with regulations that put a cap on their emissions. Like a mortgage, the CRO wouldn’t cost anything up front — but the company would have to pay interest on it until they eventually “pay it back” by removing that ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
“It takes that burden of removal, and it moves it forward in time to the near term,” said Marcus Thomson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a co-author of the paper. He said CROs could be “an enforcing agent to make sure we don’t just load the future with our problems today.”
After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself
“There was an inevitability about this. Across the world, concrete has become synonymous with development. In theory, the laudable goal of human progress is measured by a series of economic and social indicators, such as life-expectancy, infant mortality and education levels. But to political leaders, by far the most important metric is gross domestic product, a measure of economic activity that, more often than not, is treated as a calculation of economic size. GDP is how governments assess their weight in the world. And nothing bulks up a country like concrete.“
A large and growing literature estimates the effects of climate change, but these numbers vary widely, and there is a debate surrounding how they should be applied for policymaking. Though long-term outcomes remain uncertain, policymakers should plan for updates to the policy, adjust their goals, and account for new information, technology, and diplomatic developments.
A price on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have long been a preferred instrument among economists and other academicians for addressing the threat of climate change.
Why the American Petroleum Institute is doing a 180 on carbon pricing
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
Twelve years ago, the American Petroleum Institute ran an ad in the print version of the Washington Post. “If you like $4 gasoline,” it read, “you’ll love the House Climate Bill.”
This was during President Barack Obama’s first term, when a gallon of gas cost barely $2.70, and API — a coalition of over 600 companies and the oil and gas industry’s top lobby group — was fighting against the Waxman-Markey Act, landmark legislation to put a price on carbon emissions across the country.
Now, however, the big oil group might be about to change its tune. The group is discussing a draft statement in support of putting a price on carbon emissions — the very same policy that they helped defeat 12 years ago. Such a price, in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade bill, would increase the cost of fossil fuels and theoretically help to cut carbon pollution across the entire economy. And API isn’t the only business and fossil fuel group coming around on“market-based” climate action. Last September, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of 200 CEOs including the leaders of Chevron and ConocoPhillips, announced its support for a carbon price; in January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long one of the most powerful lobbying groups, did the same.
But are these claims evidence of a real change of heart — or just an attempt to sidestep even more costly regulations from the new, Democratically-controlled Congress?
“It may well be that the API is realizing that carbon pricing is an idea whose time has come,” said Anne Kelly, the vice president of government relations at the sustainability nonprofit Ceres. “They know that regulations are coming, and so I think they want to be a part of those negotiations to shape what a carbon pricing system would look like.”
But the move could also be an attempt to hamstring other, less palatable policies from gaining too much traction, like more stringent regulations. Democrats in the House and Senate have largely turned away from carbon taxes and cap-and-trade in favor of things like a clean electricity standard — a mandate that the country’s electricity be produced by clean sources by 2035 — or other rules and regulations that would be overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. On Tuesday, Democrats unveiled their first big climate proposal this Congress, which included such a standard, but no carbon tax.
The group’s draft statement seemed to confirm this. “API supports economy-wide carbon pricing as the primary government climate policy instrument to reduce CO2 emissions while helping keep energy affordable, instead of mandates or prescriptive regulatory action,” the statement read, according to the Wall Street Journal.
