Carbon Pricing Would Cut the Deficit and Create Jobs
Carbon Pricing Would Cut the Deficit and Create Jobs
As Congress takes a hard look at deficit reduction, we should put all of our options on the table. A price on carbon is one of these options. It could raise upward of $846 billion over a 10-year period, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office
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These ideas aren’t new, and they are historically not highly partisan as current conservative leaders would have you believe. In fact, the three most recent Republican presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush—all promoted use of a cap-and-trade mechanism for efficiently lowering dangerous pollution. They employed such systems to phase out lead in gasoline, cut chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and reduce sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain—all without undue cost.
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A price on carbon would spur job creation in emerging sectors and industries from clean-tech manufacturing to R&D centers around the country. A Berkeley-Yale analysis of the Senate’s American Clean Energy and Security Act (Waxman-Markey), a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill with a cap-and-trade pricing system, estimated net job creation from a price on carbon included in the bill at 918,000 to 1.1 million jobs. CAP and the Political Economy Research Institute found job creation potential of 1.7 million jobs from the Waxman-Markey bill, which also contained a carbon pricing system.
In-depth information about the proposed bills (which of course the GOP will never permit to pass) is available at the above link.