{"id":17,"date":"2007-05-17T14:53:07","date_gmt":"2007-05-17T20:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2007-09-18T17:53:57","modified_gmt":"2007-09-18T23:53:57","slug":"a-revenue-neutral-carbon-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"A Revenue Neutral Carbon Tax?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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While in Pittsburgh, in addition to staying with cyclist Tim Kelly, Bill and I visited some our friends in town, and I stayed with my friends Kip and Aaron (meanwhile, Bill stayed with his friends, April and John Paul<\/a>) . My friend Aaron, shown on the right in his Pittsburgh apartment, recently finished his PhD in environmental economics (you can call him ‘Dr. Swoboda’ if you like) and is now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh (here is his blog<\/a>). Over a drink, I asked Aaron how he would make us reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. <\/p>\n

“A revenue neutral carbon tax,” he told me. <\/p>\n

The idea is to put a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, so that we have incentives to reduce our use of fossil fuels. This means energy from coal would cost more, as would gasoline. To make a difference, Aaron suggested that each gallon of gasoline might cost 50 cents to a dollar more. Aaron liked this solution because people who reduce their use of fossil fuel would be rewarded.<\/p>\n

The revenue neutral part means that taxes elsewhere would be cut. For instance, income tax might be reduced. (The tricky part is that poorer people spend a much higher percentage of their paycheck on energy and gasoline, so they would be hurt more by a carbon tax – thus, their taxes would have to be cut much more). If done correctly, everyone would pay about the same amount of taxes, only now we would have a bigger incentive to pollute less and switch to non-greenhouse gas producing energy. Ok – yes, gas prices are already high, but this tax would be different, becuase instead of the money going to oil companies, the money would go towards lowering your taxes elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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I will admit that we got into a bit of an argument, as I argued that we should also have higher efficiency standards, and that we need more policies than just a tax to encourage us to be more efficient, to which Aaron replied that such efficiency standards were government interference when a carbon tax would be much simpler and have the same result.<\/p>\n

I still believe in efficiency standards (as they are more politically viable as well), but why shouldn’t we take some of Aaron’s advice? Why not put a tax on things we should consume less of? Doesn’t a tax on gas and fossil fuels make some sense, especially if it is balanced with tax cuts elsewhere? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While in Pittsburgh, in addition to staying with cyclist Tim Kelly, Bill and I visited some our friends in town, and I stayed with my friends Kip and Aaron (meanwhile, Bill stayed with his friends, April and John Paul) . My friend Aaron, shown on the right in his Pittsburgh apartment, recently finished his PhD […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rideforclimate.com\/usa\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}