Do market-based mitigation policies work? Analyzing the impacts of the British Columbian carbon tax on provincial level carbon emissions.

摘要

Global increases of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly over the last fifty years, have put climate change mitigation on the international policy agenda. There is a general consensus that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, accounting for approximately 80 percent of total GHG emissions, is the main cause of global warming. Increasingly, policymakers have coalesced around market-based policies as the most efficient means of lowering emissions. This analysis looks at one of these policies, the carbon tax policy in British Columbia, and assesses its effectiveness to date. Implemented in 2008, this policy is the most expansive climate change mitigation policy currently in existence in the Western Hemisphere. In order to assess its effectiveness, this analysis employs a fully specified difference-in-difference-in-difference model that controls for provincial-level, time, and economic sector fixed effects. Unlike most other studies of the policy, this analysis finds no evidence of a relationship between implementation of the carbon tax policy and the province's per capita emissions totals.