Efforts to make a carbon tax

Carbon pricing is a way to pass on the costs of greenhouse gases to the organization responsible for them. The group Citizens’ Climate Lobby is urging carbon pricing with dividends returned to citizens. We spoke with Bill Barron, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Mountain States Regional Coordinator for more.

Let’s talk about carbon pricing. We will start with defining terms, what is carbon pricing?

Barron: “The Citizen’s Climate lobby, who I work for, we advocate for a carbon price that is unique because it is the money collected don the fee on carbon emissions. It is collected into a pool and distributed back to households. So it is progressive in that the money that is collected goes back. So there are different ways to look at a carbon price. If you talk about a carbon price alone, it is a lot different than a carbon price that returns the money back, because that is the way to protect the low and middle-income households.”

Is it in the same neighborhood as a carbon fee?

Barron: “Yes, naturally I move towards carbon a carbon pricing or a carbon fee because the money is returned to households. But the buzz phrase is a carbon tax, we just want to try to clarify that we call it a fee because the money is not held by the government but returned to households.”

It is an incentive for businesses to do what? Not pollute so much?

Barron: “Yeah, so the idea is that right now there is no accountability for the pollution that is going into the atmosphere. The idea is to have a market base solution, what it does is holds accountability for the pollution that is going into the atmosphere. It creates an incentive for businesses as well as individuals to want to be more efficient.”