carbon tax news from mongabay.com

Australia's carbon tax moves closer to reality

2011-10-12T16:59:00Z

By a margin of just two votes (74-72), Australia's plan to put a price on carbon passed its toughest hurdle today. It is now expected that the Australian legislator will moved forward to put the carbon tax into law. The carbon tax, pushed aggressively by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, was just as ferociously opposed by business leaders and opposition party leader, Tony Abbott.

Australia launches limited carbon tax

2011-07-11T20:45:00Z

Australia's 500 largest polluters will pay AU$23 ($24.60) per ton of carbon dioxide emitted beginning July 2012 under a plan announced by Australian prime minister Julia Gilliard.

France announces carbon tax

2009-09-10T18:43:00Z

The President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has announced that he will implement a carbon tax to help "save the human race" from global warming.

Lomborg calls for a carbon tax

2009-06-17T14:27:00Z

Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish business school professor and author who has riled environmentalists by arguing that addressing climate change should be a lesser priority than health and nutrition initiatives, is calling for a $7 per ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Excluding forest carbon from climate policy will spur massive deforestation

2009-05-28T18:24:00Z

Failure to develop policies that account for emissions from land use change will lead to widespread deforestation and higher costs for addressing climate change, warn researchers writing in the journal Science. Using a computer model that incorporates economics, energy, agriculture, land-use changes, emissions and concentrations of greenhouse gases, a team of researchers from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Maryland found that efforts to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide levels while ignoring emissions from terrestrial sources would lead to nearly a complete loss of unmanaged forests by 2100, resulting largely from increased expansion of bioenergy crops. Meanwhile placing a value ("tax") on terrestrial carbon emissions equivalent to that on industrial and fossil fuel emissions would lead to an increase in forest cover.

Cap or Tax Carbon Emissions?

2009-02-04T20:05:00Z

Debate is raging about the relative merits of a carbon tax or a cap and trade system as the centerpiece of federal legislation to reduce emissions that fuel global warming. Here is why cap and trade must be the U.S. policy instrument of choice.

US government: $28 carbon price would raise gas prices by 25 cents

2008-10-08T14:30:39Z

A national carbon price under a cap-and-trade system would have a limited impact on gasoline prices, reports a new study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The report estimates that a carbon price of $28 per ton — a bit less than current carbon prices in the European market — would boost gas prices by 25 cents per gallon, while a $200 per ton tax would increase prices by less then $2. The findings suggest that the cost of climate change legislation may be lower than claimed by industry, but also indicate that efforts to curb Americans' driving habitats via a carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme may be of limited effectiveness. A $2 increase in the price of gas would still leave U.S. fuel prices well below those in most of the world.

Carbon tax will ease transition to sensible climate policy

2008-08-13T14:30:00Z

The management of carbon dioxide and the climate represent both an economic development challenge and the ecological problem of the next hundred years. Energy use, economic success and carbon dioxide emissions are, currently, intertwined. A carbon market that represents the true cost of energy and the disposal of our waste products in the environment is a potential long-term policy mechanism for carbon dioxide management. However, the strong interconnection between carbon dioxide emissions and economic success distinguishes the carbon market from other environmental markets used to control pollution. Therefore evolution to that solution is not straightforward; there are a series of necessary steps needed to develop a market.

Despite loss in Congress, global warming lobby gains momentum say environmentalists

2008-06-08T14:30:39Z

Friday's defeat of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 3036) by the Senate is being painted by environmentalists as a step towards future legislative success.

Bloomberg calls for a carbon tax

2007-12-13T14:30:39Z

New York City mayor and potential U.S. presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said that carbon cap-and-trade schemes are vulnerable to "special interests, corruption, inefficiencies," and should be replaced by straight carbon taxes, reports the Associated Press.

$400/ton carbon tax needed to curb aviation emissions

2007-09-04T14:30:39Z

European Union proposals to reduce the climate impact of aviation will fail unless there is a substantial rise in carbon prices, concludes analysis by the Tyndall Centre, a UK-based climate research body. Friends of the Earth (FoE), an environmental lobby group, funded the study.