Book contents
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
5 - The Case for Environmental Taxation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The cornerstone of this book’s proposal is a system of environmental taxes, which will serve as price signals for polluting activities. This part of the proposal is so central because prices are the cornerstone of a healthy market economy; without prices, there is no market. With inaccurate prices, markets will function, but they will misallocate resources. That describes how the entire world, including even Sweden, functions: the value of the global environment is almost never accurately priced into day-to-day activities. An environmental tax, if set at the correct level, would reflect the cost of some harm inflicted upon the environment, and therefore act as an appropriate price for that harm. An environmental tax would typically be levied upon some small but measurable unit of pollution: a ton of carbon dioxide, a ton of sulfur dioxide, or a pound of nitrogen oxides.
- Type
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- Information
- Capitalism and the EnvironmentA Proposal to Save the Planet, pp. 108 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021