Blog Posts: carbon pricing

New WRI research explores how the United States can design a carbon tax that improves the economy and achieves emissions-reduction goals.

Forty Indian companies are setting a price on their internal carbon emissions, joining a global movement.

Mahindra Rise Chairman Anand Mahindra told a World Economic Forum crowd that climate action is “the next century’s biggest business and financial opportunity.”

Computers are invaluable aides to tracking deforestation. But some issues require local expertise to crack—in this case, allowing WRI to map drylands forests that add up to an area equivalent to the Amazon rainforest.

Mexico is establishing a carbon price in order to reduce its emissions 22 percent below 2000 levels by 2030; 50 percent by 2050. As other countries like China and Singapore pursue similar plans, they can learn from Mexico's progress.

The social cost of carbon helps analysts assess the economic benefits of climate action and costs of inaction. Dropping it, as the Trump administration is considering, will prevent the government from using the best available science in decision-making or holding polluters accountable.

The proposed economy-wide tax could enable the United States to achieve its international emissions targets with better economic outcomes than under a purely regulatory approach.

Some oppose carbon taxes on the grounds that they disproportionately hurt poor and middle-class households. But WRI research finds that with the right design, a carbon price could protect poor households from increasing energy prices, support the middle class and spur economic growth.

While a carbon tax has attracted little attention in the U.S. media before the primary debate last week, WRI research shows it's a policy that can reduce emissions in cost-effective, pro-growth and equitable ways. In fact, some 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and regions have or are planning on putting carbon prices in place.

Hard economic times have prompted West Virginia to look toward a future that depends less on coal and more on renewable energy, a higher-technology job market and even a price on climate-warming carbon dioxide.