This week, diplomats are gathered in Bonn, Germany to hammer out the latest details of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. While the minutiae of the negotiations are important, the real action isn’t at the UN. The climate pact is bottom up, which means it’s up to each country to meet the goals set forth in Paris.
One of the simplest tools for making progress would be a tax on carbon. Few people like taxes in the abstract, but they help address a real, pressing problem. A carbon tax would bring the price of fossil fuels closer to its true cost to the climate and to public health.
Earlier this year, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said that in order to rein in destructive carbon pollution, countries should implement a tax on carbon of $40 per ton by 2020 that would rise to as much as $100 per ton over the following decade.
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