The Hill's Overnight Energy and the Environment:
OBAMA CHATS CARBON TAX: President Obama downplayed Tuesday the likelihood of the U.S. passing a tax on carbon dioxide pollution any time soon, though he acknowledged that a carbon price is his preferred way to address climate change.
"It's difficult," Obama told reporters on Paris on Tuesday. He said, though, that as private entities like insurers begin to raise their prices to deal with climate change, lawmakers might be inclined to follow the trend and approve a cap-and-trade system in the future.
"The more the market on its own starts putting a price on it because of risk, it may be that the politics around setting up a cap-and-trade system, for example, shifts as well," he said.
Obama has long supported cap-and-trade, calling it Tuesday "the most elegant way" to address climate change. But he failed to pass such a proposal through Congress during his first term.
Before Obama went to Paris on Sunday, a slate of academics, policymakers and scientists with the Carbon Tax Center released a letter pushing world leaders to institute carbon pricing in their push against climate change.
"We are seeing the beginning of a global transformation to sustainable, clean energy," Steven Chu, Obama's first secretary of Energy, said in a statement. "A clear, rising carbon tax in as many countries as possible is the best way to accelerate this revolution."
This summary goes back and forth between cap-and-trade and carbon tax as if they almost synonomous (i.e., both good ways of addressing climate change). Snark: Weird that, when we all know that there is only one acceptable economic incentive-based policy!
