2008-09-12

The Impacts of 10 Different Cap-and-Trade Scenarios. Posted by Rich Sweeney, CommonTragedies, September 10, 2008. "Last week Dallas Burtraw, Margaret Walls and I released a new Resources For the Future discussion paper titled, 'Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit: The Incidence of U.S. Climate Policy' [PDF, 71 pp]. In it we analyze the first-order impacts of 10 different cap-and-trade policy alternatives across regions and income groups... [in order] to highlight the potential distributional effects of capping carbon and to describe the broad range of options available for policymakers to address these effects. There's too much in the paper for me to summarize here... [but] the most basic conclusion of the paper [are]: 1) Consumption patterns and carbon footprints vary across regions and income groups [and thus] the effects of placing a price on carbon will also vary along these dimensions. 2) At the same time, pricing carbon will also create an enormous new asset... [and] how policymakers decide to allocate this value will, in the end, determine who bears the cost of U.S. climate policy. ...Please feel free to contact me [Rich Sweeney] with comments. We've already received a lot of really great feedback, and plan to revisit the paper at some point in the near future. Finally, Dallas is slated to testify before Ways and Means on this and other climate policy issues next week. Word is that Bloomberg's gonna be on the panel as well. Stay tuned."

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