Carbon Tax

The COP26 global climate summit is, by design, about bargaining and voluntary steps, not mandates and penalties. But Europe is poised to add a tough-love tactic on the side. Will it help?

What happens when one trading power​ ​is trying to drive down carbon emissions, and other nations aren’t moving so fast? That’s a hot question for the European Union, which makes its heavily polluting industries pay for their pollution while ​many other countries don’t.

Over the past decade, Exxon Mobil Corp. ― once the chief funder of think tanks that sowed lies about how burning fossil fuels affects the planet’s temperature ― abandoned its denial of climate change and embraced economists’ favored solution: putting a tax on carbon emissions.

President Biden is seeking an unprecedented level of U.S. reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A surprising twist: His administration and others are shying away from one of the biggest potential tools for doing that.

During his first months in office, President Joe Biden has pushed an unprecedentedly aggressive climate agenda, rejoining a global treaty, firing off executive orders, and proposing billions of dollars for transitioning toward a clean energy economy.

The oil industry’s top lobbying group will push Congress for legislation to price carbon emissions across the economy, in a sharp policy turnabout a decade after the industry helped kill a similar effort to address climate change.

The board of directors of the American Petroleum Institute, one of Washington’s most powerful trade associations, which for years worked to play down the impact of climate change, on Thursday approved a “climate action framework,” a wide-sweeping plan to lower the emissions blamed for global warming.

It was weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the country and kept Americans huddled inside. So members of Oregon’s legislature were still showing up for work to haggle over language, introduce bills, and cast votes. But on this particular morning, 11 of the 12 Republican senators in the 30-person body were nowhere to be found. Sergeants-at-arms searched Capitol offices, then gave up; eventually, the Senate was forced to adjourn, lacking the two-thirds majority needed to conduct basic business.

In a recent editorial in support of a carbon tax, The Washington Post complains that “Americans are burning record amounts of gasoline,” arguing that “one of the most glaring … flaws” of the “Environmental Protection Agency fuel-efficiency mandates” is the reality that the regulations “cannot control how much people drive or what type of vehicles people buy.”