Surprise! Even A Crazy-High Carbon Tax Would Help California Businesses
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This material, Surprise! Even A Crazy-High Carbon Tax Would Help California Businesses, was published by ThinkProgress.
According to a new study out of California, taxing carbon emissions at a whopping $200 per ton would create more jobs in the state than business-as-usual.
The report was commissioned by Citizens Climate Lobby and carried out by Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI). The latter used a model of the California economy they’ve developed and combined it with the Carbon Tax Analysis Model — an open-source, Microsoft Excel-based model of carbon emissions and tax revenues at the state level, built off data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The resulting simulation looked at three different tax levels: $50 per ton of carbon emissions, $100 per ton, and $200 per ton. All three started at $10 per ton in 2015, then rose $10 annually until they hit their maximum level: $50 in 2019, $100 in 2024, and $200 in 2034.
Lots of previous analyses have tried to model the economic cost of the damage climate change will impose, and $200 per ton of emissions is consistent with several of them. But it’s also way higher than anything lawmakers here or elsewhere have considered. The Canadian province of British Columbia, for example, has a carbon tax of $27.88 per ton. When the Obama Administration estimated the price of carbon, the mid-range of their numbers was around $40 per ton.
Read the rest of this article on ThinkProgress.
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