KYOTO PROTOCOL OR A GLOBAL CARBON TAX?

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Professor William Nordhaus' presentation to the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress Plenary Session, 11 March 2009 continues to reverberate. His first strike is against the present Kyoto Regime; as he puts it “the world should dump the “inefficient and ineffective” Kyoto protocol and replace it with a global carbon tax...”
The central premise of his proposal stems from the question of "how the goals of climate policy can be effectively and efficiently implemented on the national and sub-national scale"?
To this end he suggests that "We need to move the burden of taxation away from labour to resources — and tax not just on carbon but other resources such as water to tackle the far wider environmental and resource problems we face.”
Given how difficult it maybe to scrap the Kyoto Regime given the political economy considerations, I think that the measures worth exploring as suggested by Professor Nordhaus include :
• Modifying the Kyoto Protocol to include tax-type models.
• Broadening the Kyoto treaty to allow countries to fulfill their treaty obligations if they have a domestic regime with a minimum carbon price attached to all emissions.
The full text of the presentation is here.
The audio file can be downloaded here. Professor Nordhaus’ presentation is from minute 23:43 – 42:12

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