IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rff/dpaper/dp-16-48.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Using a Carbon Tax to Meet US International Climate Pledges

Author

Listed:
  • Chen, Yunguang

    (Resources for the Future)

  • Hasfstead, Marc A.C.

    (Resources for the Future)

Abstract

The United States recently ratified the Paris Agreement, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in which it pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent, relative to 2005, by 2025. In the absence of policy efforts beyond those currently in place or already proposed by the Obama administration, the United States would likely fall well short of its promises. However, a federal economy-wide carbon tax on US carbon dioxide emissions could significantly contribute to the additional reductions necessary to fulfill our international climate commitments. Using a detailed multisector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we predict the carbon price paths that would be necessary to meet the 28 percent emissions target and show the economic costs of such carbon-pricing policies. We then demonstrate how both the price paths and associated costs change if action is delayed.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Yunguang & Hasfstead, Marc A.C., 2016. "Using a Carbon Tax to Meet US International Climate Pledges," RFF Working Paper Series dp-16-48, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-16-48
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-16-48.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert McClelland & Shannon Mok, 2012. "A Review of Recent Research on Labor Supply Elasticities: Working Paper 2012-12," Working Papers 43675, Congressional Budget Office.
    2. Goulder, Lawrence H. & Hafstead, Marc A.C. & Kim, GyuRim & Long, Xianling, 2019. "Impacts of a carbon tax across US household income groups: What are the equity-efficiency trade-offs?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 44-64.
    3. Lawrence H. Goulder & Marc A. C. Hafstead & Roberton C. Williams III, 2016. "General Equilibrium Impacts of a Federal Clean Energy Standard," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 8(2), pages 186-218, May.
    4. Roberton C. Williams III & Hal Gordon & Dallas Burtraw & Jared C. Carbone & Richard D. Morgenstern, 2015. "The Initial Incidence of a Carbon Tax Across Income Groups," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 68(1), pages 195-214, March.
    5. Parry Ian W. H. & Williams Roberton C., 2010. "What are the Costs of Meeting Distributional Objectives for Climate Policy?," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 1-35, December.
    6. Russell W. Cooper & John C. Haltiwanger, 2006. "On the Nature of Capital Adjustment Costs," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(3), pages 611-633.
    7. Dale W. Jorgenson & Richard J. Goettle & Mun S. Ho & Peter J. Wilcoxen, 2018. "The Welfare Consequences Of Taxing Carbon," Climate Change Economics (CCE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 9(01), pages 1-39, February.
    8. Parry, Ian W.H. & Williams, Roberton C. III, 2010. "What Are the Costs of Meeting Distributional Objectives in Designing Domestic Climate Policy?," RFF Working Paper Series dp-10-51, Resources for the Future.
    9. Lawrence H. Summers, 1981. "Taxation and Corporate Investment: A q-Theory Approach," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 12(1), pages 67-140.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Goulder, Lawrence H. & Hafstead, Marc A.C. & Kim, GyuRim & Long, Xianling, 2019. "Impacts of a carbon tax across US household income groups: What are the equity-efficiency trade-offs?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 44-64.
    2. Liu, Weifeng & McKibbin, Warwick J. & Morris, Adele C. & Wilcoxen, Peter J., 2020. "Global economic and environmental outcomes of the Paris Agreement," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    3. Arampatzidis, Ioannis & Dergiades, Theologos & Kaufmann, Robert K. & Panagiotidis, Theodore, 2021. "Oil and the U.S. stock market: Implications for low carbon policies," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    4. Lei, Nuoa & Masanet, Eric, 2020. "Statistical analysis for predicting location-specific data center PUE and its improvement potential," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 201(C).
    5. Jia, Zhijie & Lin, Boqiang, 2022. "CEEEA2.0 model: A dynamic CGE model for energy-environment-economy analysis with available data and code," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nils Ohlendorf & Michael Jakob & Jan Christoph Minx & Carsten Schröder & Jan Christoph Steckel, 2021. "Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing: A Meta-Analysis," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 78(1), pages 1-42, January.
    2. Roberton C. Williams III, 2016. "Environmental Taxation," NBER Working Papers 22303, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Rausch, Sebastian & Schwarz, Giacomo A., 2016. "Household heterogeneity, aggregation, and the distributional impacts of environmental taxes," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 43-57.
    4. Frederick Ploeg, 2023. "Fiscal Costs of Climate Policies: Role of Tax, Political, and Behavioural Distortions," De Economist, Springer, vol. 171(2), pages 119-137, June.
    5. Nils Ohlendorf & Michael Jakob & Jan Christoph Minx & Carsten Schröder & Jan Christoph Steckel, 2018. "Distributional Impacts of Climate Mitigation Policies - a Meta-Analysis," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1776, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    6. Gordon, Hal & Burtraw, Dallas & Williams, Roberton, 2015. "A Microsimulation Model of the Distributional Impacts of Climate Policies," RFF Working Paper Series dp-14-40, Resources for the Future.
    7. Robert N. Stavins, 2020. "The Future of US Carbon-Pricing Policy," Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(1), pages 8-64.
    8. Zhao, Jiaxin & Mattauch, Linus, 2021. "When standards have better distributional consequences than carbon taxes," VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics 242351, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. Goulder, Lawrence H., 2013. "Climate change policy's interactions with the tax system," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(S1), pages 3-11.
    10. Stephie Fried & Kevin Novan & William Peterman, 2018. "The Distributional Effects of a Carbon Tax on Current and Future Generations," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 30, pages 30-46, October.
    11. Stavins, Robert N., 2019. "The Future of U.S. Carbon-Pricing Policy: Normative Assessment and Positive Prognosis," Working Paper Series rwp19-017, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    12. Justin Caron & Jefferson Cole & Richard Goettle & Chikara Onda & James Mcfarland & Jared Woollacott, 2018. "Distributional Implications Of A National Co2 Tax In The U.S. Across Income Classes And Regions: A Multi-Model Overview," Climate Change Economics (CCE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 9(01), pages 1-32, February.
    13. Dale W. Jorgenson & Richard J. Goettle & Mun S. Ho & Peter J. Wilcoxen, 2018. "The Welfare Consequences Of Taxing Carbon," Climate Change Economics (CCE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 9(01), pages 1-39, February.
    14. Macon, Luke & McLellan, Benjamin & Kanamura, Takashi, 2019. "Climate Policies and the Tax-Interaction Effect, in Context," MPRA Paper 97053, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Cullenward, Danny & T. Wilkerson, Jordan & Wara, Michael & Weyant, John P., 2016. "Dynamically estimating the distributional impacts of U.S. climate policy with NEMS: A case study of the Climate Protection Act of 2013," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 303-318.
    16. Zhao, Jiaxin & Mattauch, Linus, 2022. "When standards have better distributional consequences than carbon taxes," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    17. Lawrence H. Goulder, 2013. "Markets for Pollution Allowances: What Are the (New) Lessons?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(1), pages 87-102, Winter.
    18. Monika Merz & Eran Yashiv, 2007. "Labor and the Market Value of the Firm," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(4), pages 1419-1431, September.
    19. John Stranlund & Carlos Chávez, 2013. "Who should bear the administrative costs of an emissions tax?," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 44(1), pages 53-79, August.
    20. Parry, Ian, 2015. "Designing Fiscal Policy to Address the External Costs of Energy," International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, now publishers, vol. 8(1), pages 1-56, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    carbon tax; climate; emissions targets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q50 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - General
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy
    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-16-48. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Resources for the Future (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rffffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.