Although the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) did not include any environmental tax provisions, numerous tax policy discussions in the United States have considered implementing a carbon tax, giving rise to concerns about such a tax‘s potential negative effects on economic growth and the distribution of income in the US economy. This chapter examines the macroeconomic and distributional effects of implementing a representative carbon tax under several assumptions about recycling resulting tax revenues. It simulates these effects using the Diamond-Zodrow (DZ) dynamic overlapping generations computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Earlier literature and our results confirm that: (i) the negative effects of a carbon tax are moderate on the level of future GDP and negligible on the rate of economic growth; and (ii) the regressive effects of a carbon tax can easily be offset with judicious use of the resulting revenues. Policies that use carbon tax revenues to finance uniform per-household rebates and to enact policies favorable to capital formation, such as elimination of both personal taxes on dividends and capital gains, and national debt, can have a highly progressive net impact.

The Law and Economics literature details how information can be generated from legal rules drawn from both private and public spheres; designing legal rules to become more effective in creating useful information to improve both private and public decision making. We examined the market-based tool known as marketable emission permits or as tradable permits. The ability to sell permits does provide incentives if holders of permits can find greener solutions at prices attractive enough to sell off their permits. Pigou advocated for placing taxes on activities that led to negative externalities; that by carefully adding tax costs to the activity so that the marginal costs could become accurate, fully reflective of the externalities. Coase’s analysis of transaction costs complicates the question of against whom should the taxes be levied. Taxing activities that could give rise to environmental injuries must carefully understand the relative elasticities of demand to ensure that the tax will actually fall on the correct party and thus create the correct incentives. In conclusion, we found that market-based instruments worked best alongside more traditional forms of public regulation, that market-based instruments are not robustly implemented as a stand-alone alternative to traditional forms of public regulation.