People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.
Bill Gates
Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
The push is the R&D, the pull is the carbon tax. Yes, the government will be somewhat inept, but the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.
Paul Krugman
Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist
Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax.
You then offset that [carbon tax] with a reduction in payroll taxes, dollar for dollar. And that's why I was so flexible. It's a tax swap, that's what I was talking about. It wouldn't grow the government, and it would approximate the attachment of these negative externalities to combustion fossil fuels.
The cost of a carbon tax (likely less than 0.8% of GDP) is well south of the expected costs of warming by 2100 (as mentioned earlier, a conservative 3.6% or more of GDP).