How To Make Climate Policy Fair
Over at Washington Budget and Policy Center, Kate Baber has a smart new paper out: How To Lower Costs of Climate Change Policies for Consumers (pdf).
It's a good practical guide for how to make climate policy fair, a subject that is of course near and dear to Sightline's heart. In the context of using auction revenue to protect low income consumers from the effects of carbon pricing, Kate explores the merits of several mechanisms for actually distributing revenue to consumers. If you're into climate fairness, it's definitely worth a read.
Oregon Tax Credit Program Needs Improvement
Throughout Cascadia -- at the city, state, and provincial level -- governments are figuring out ways to promote energy efficiency through financial incentives. Most of this has focused on financial tools that would use public dollars for low-interest loans to motivate home and business owners to make capital improvements to save energy.
One such program in Oregon, the Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC or ‘Betsy’), has by most measures been a great success. A recently completed study conducted by ECONorthwest showed huge benefits from the program in 2007 and 2008—1700 jobs and $41.8 million in wages. The study further showed that for those two years the program resulted in a net annual reduction of 2,404,121 tons of carbon emissions and a net annual energy savings of over $290 million dollars.
- Climate
- Efficiency
- Energy
- Economy
- Environment
- Green Business
- Policy
- Solutions
- British Columbia
- Cascadia
- Oregon
- United States
- US Northwest
- Washington
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