Revista de Ciencia Política

The Promises and Pitfalls of Taxing Carbon

2024-08-28T15:08:13+00:00

Carbon taxes are an important part of the policy toolbox for addressing climate change. Some economists, like William Nordhaus, have gone so far as to claim that “raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming” (Nordhaus 2008, p. 22). Others have expressed skepticism about the efficacy of carbon taxes, at least as they have been configured so far (Green, 2021). Nevertheless, there is broad agreement—especially amongst economists—that carbon taxes are a critical policy instrument for disincentivizing unsustainable behavior and making green alternatives more attractive (Mintz-Woo, 2022; Mintz-Woo, 2024).

A Social Contract Cas e for a Carbon Tax: Ending Aviation Exceptionalism

2024-07-29T23:46:10+00:00

The social contract tradition’s promise of facilitating just interaction among large groups of strangers remains as salient as ever. Kant in particular recognised that economic activity imposes costs on large and unspecifiable groups of people who cannot be asked in advance for their consent; he concluded that in order to engage in economic activity while dealing ethically with everyone, we require the state and the rule of law to set out the norms under which we can engage in other-affecting activity like commerce. In response to the challenge of coordinating the welter of anonymous interactions that modern economic life consists in, contract theory offers the social conventions of money and law.

However imperfectly these conventions operate in practice, people rely on them to orient themselves in the world. Carbon taxes have been touted by economists for decades as the most efficient way to send appropriate signals to people about their emissions behavior. The widely underappreciated fact that most fuel for international air travel remains untaxed—and is thus effectively subsidized relative to the rest of the economy—provides an especially vivid illustration of the necessity for appropriate social conventions to provide the conditions under which economic activity can be undertaken with less injustice.

In this paper, I explain why people seeking to flourish together fairly in the imperfect world we share today ought to support a universal carbon tax with no exception for international aviation. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I provide a free-standing analysis of emissions behavior at the individual moral level. Second, I offer a picture of ideal and non-ideal coordination based mostly on Kantian social contract theory. Third, I argue that in a non-ideal context, moral signals about right relation offer a coordinating fulcrum around which meaningful if only partly coordinated action is possible. Fourth, I apply these conclusions to the case of aviation exceptionalism, focusing especially on instances of incomplete, overlapping, partly coordinated climate actions. I conclude that these arguments together amount to a case for reversing the Chicago Convention and applying a universal carbon tax that does not exclude international flights, ending aviation exceptionalism.

Why not a Carbon Tax?

2024-07-31T17:29:09+00:00

If the world is to overcome the threat of climate change, a price must be set on carbon. A carbon tax is a means of creating a carbon price, and it is an ideal tax in that, unlike most taxes, it promotes economic efficiency. Yet many countries have no carbon tax. The reason is that there are strong political interests opposed to taxing carbon. I shall argue that these interests need to be appeased by fully compensating anyone who would otherwise be harmed by a carbon tax. This includes the owners and workers in the fossil fuel industries. If a carbon tax is to be successful, it needs to be introduced alongside an appropriate system of compensation. Some of the compensation will need to be paid out of public debt, and this will be feasible for many countries only if they are supported by a new financial institution: a World Climate Bank.

Incorporating Equitable Carbon Access into Carbon Taxes

2024-07-30T00:15:24+00:00

As climate change mitigation measures, carbon taxes ought to assign the burdens associated with decarbonization equitably and should at least aim to avoid perpetuating wide inequities in carbon access. While several popular carbon taxation schemes incorporate “feebate” or other redistribute adjustments designed to offset the regressive impacts of rising energy costs, seeking to neutralize the burden-sharing inequity of such policies, they can also contribute to inequities in carbon access, which constitute a second kind of inequity that offsetting schemes may not neutralize. Attention to resource-sharing principles that capture this latter equity objective suggests a comparison between downstream rationing schemes that allocate carbon access among persons and at the point of consumption, thereby instantiating resource-sharing equity, and the carbon pricing schemes that require extensive modifications in order to approximate such equity ideals. In this paper, I compare the two for purposes of focusing on this neglected second equity concern in the design of carbon pricing schemes like carbon taxes as well as on incorporating other justice-related advantages of downstream rationing into such a scheme.