UMass Amherst research suggests more-effective climate policy would punish carbon-intensive investments instead of placing an unfair carbon tax on consumption.
The top 10% of the wealthiest Americans churn out 40% of the nation’s climate- warming emissions, says a new study, and yet most current climate-change policy wants to unduly punish poorer residents by taxing purchases.
The results are the basis for the researchers’ suggestion that more-effective climate policy would target such investments and not punish point-of-purchase consumption of goods such as food, gasoline RB00, -1.74% and technology, taxes that tend to sting lower-income groups more than their higher-earning counterparts.
These regressive taxes “disproportionately punish the poor while having little impact on the extremely wealthy, who tend to save and invest a large share of their income,” said Jared Starr, a sustainability scientist at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study. “Consumption-based approaches miss something important: carbon pollution generates income, but when that income is reinvested into stocks SPX, rather than spent on necessities, it isn’t subject to a consumption-based carbon tax.
Global warming is a natural phenomenon, and some of this summer’s warming was boosted by El Niño, the recurring weather pattern whose latest effects, scientists say, are only beginning. Still, it’s the speed of warming in the last several decades, boosted by man-made burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas that alarms scientists and policy makers.
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