Five myths about carbon pricing

While carbon pricing, in general, and carbon taxes, in particular, are popular with economists, they are subject to considerable misunderstanding among policy-makers and the public. In this paper I consider and refute five myths about carnbon taxes: (i) that a carbon price will hurt economic growth; (ii) that carbon pricing will kill jobs; (iii) that a carbon tax and cap-and-trade programme have the same economic impacts; (iv) that we can’t achieve carbon reduction targets with a carbon tax; and (v) that carbon pricing is regressive. I then discuss implications for policy-making.