Earth Equity News

Harvard Study: $7-a-Gallon Gas Required for Significant Reductions in Transportation Emissions. Policy Brief by W. Ross Morrow, Henry Lee, Kelly Sims Gallagher, and Gustavo Collantes, Energy Policy, Belfer Center (Harvard Kennedy School), March 2010. "Reducing oil consumption and carbon emissions from transportation is a much greater challenge than conventional wisdom assumes. It will require substantially higher fuel prices, ideally in combination with more stringent regulation... Reducing CO2 emissions from the transportation sector 14% below 2005 levels by 2020 may require gas prices greater than $7/gallon by 2020... While relying on subsidies for electric or hybrid vehicles is politically seductive, it is extremely expensive and an ineffective way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near term...Aggressive climate change policy need not bring the economy to a halt. Even under high-fuels-tax, high-carbon price scenarios, losses in annual GDP, relative to business-as-usual, are less than 1%, and the economy is still projected to grow at 2.1-3.7% per year assuming a portion of the revenues collected are recycled to taxpayers."