Ottimo articolo sull'inefficacia delle politiche di carbon pricing (tasse o cap and trade) attuate finora:
As a policy, carbon pricing has the politics backward. It starts by changing the incentives to pollute. Theoretically these incentives will undermine carbon polluters’ economic and political power. But this puts the cart before the horse: we need to disrupt the political power of carbon polluters before we can meaningfully reshape economic incentives.
The policy also makes it easy for fossil fuel companies to rally opposition. Presenting themselves as champions of the little guy, these companies highlight how the policy would increase gasoline and electricity costs for the public. Polluters have even helped school boards and local governments estimate impacts from a carbon tax on their budgets. It’s not difficult to draw attention to these costs when everywhere we drive, giant signs declare the price of gasoline. If that number rises, people notice. There are no roadside signs displaying the devastating costs of climate change: wildfires, stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels, and new infectious diseases like COVID-19.
What if we could make the benefits of carbon pricing more visible? This is the logic behind the price-and-dividend approach. Canada and Switzerland are the only two countries that have adopted this policy, though it is also part of proposed legislation in Congress. Like traditional cap and trade, this policy would cap emissions and require that companies buy pollution permits. Then U.S. residents with Social Security numbers would receive money back from the program, gathered from polluting firms. According to political scientist Theda Skocpol, a dividend would give the public a tangible benefit to organize around, thus contesting the power that entrenched polluters have over U.S. policymaking. Give the public a green check every month, the thinking goes, and it might just embrace climate policies.
This is especially true for low-income households. Recent models by economists Anders Fremstad and Mark Paul show that a U.S. carbon tax, without compensation, would impose the greatest burdens on low-income households. A dividend could be designed to disproportionately return revenues to poor households.
Carbon price and dividend gives greater attention to the politics of climate policy than earlier approaches, but it still struggles to make the benefits more salient than the costs. In the two countries with a price and dividend, the benefits are buried in income tax or health insurance forms. In our own research, we find these policies do not substantively increase public support for climate policy. This shouldn’t surprise us. Dividends are, at best, a band-aid solution to carbon pricing’s political woes. They create a debate over whether people want a check to cover their increased energy costs. Yes, some would rather have the check, but most would still prefer cheap energy.
Carbon pricing may cut pollution in economists’ models. But these models do not include a clear political pathway to turn their results into reality. The idea may be better suited for later stages in society’s decarbonization efforts, to help optimize carbon pollution reduction at the margins. But as a short-term political strategy, it’s deeply flawed.
We need to be thinking at least as hard about the politics of climate policy as we are about economic efficiency. Climate policy is a repeated game unfolding over decades. Any meaningful approach must build political allies as it weakens the fossil fuel industry. To cultivate the advocates necessary for more ambitious action, we need to grow our clean energy industries—and fast. If we want 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 in the United States, we need to deploy clean energy technologies around 4 times faster than we have in the past. This speed cannot be achieved through carbon pricing alone.
[...] To make this happen, the government should spend trillions of dollars on clean energy in the coming decade. By investing in new clean energy projects, rather than imposing costs on existing assets through a carbon tax, economists Julie Rozenberg, Adrien Vogt-Schilb, and Stéphane Hallegatte suggest that the world can decarbonize without triggering a backlash through asset value destruction. In truth we may have to pay, rather than tax, to get rid of polluting assets, perhaps through loans that are conditional on deploying clean technology. Similarly, the government should make a clear plan for fossil fuel industry workers. We can’t allow this transition to hobble workers while fossil fuel executives deploy golden parachutes before declaring bankruptcy and laying everyone off.
The objective should not be getting “the prices right,” but passing large-scale industrial policy that steers our society where we need to go.