There is an old thread on carbon tax, which is interesting, but it seems to have died, and I think the topic is so important, that I start a similar one new, with a bit broader base, including cap-and-trade-systems.
The point beeing, that price-on-emissions-schemes save political energy in the moment used up in dozens of special regulations like airport taxes, fuel taxes, car emission regulations, house thermal insulation regulations, feed-in-tariffs and the like.
My special personal hobby horse would be to try to refurbish the european cap-and-trade-scheme with the following propositions:
- include all emissions, not only 50 % like now,
- let importers buy emission certificates and allow exporters to sell them. This would enable governments to take away most of the current exemptions
- cut down on clean-development-certificates (CDMs), which have been used widely to cheat
A fourth point could be to recyle the money payed fully or partly on a per-capita-basis, like James Hansen proposed for the notoriously state-hating US of A.
This might be of lesser interest for the non-european contributors of course. And as probably few to no policy makers read this forum, the discussion is somewhat l'art pour l'art, but better than nothing.
There are a lot of both tax and cap-and-trade-schemes in the world, and this thread could kind of keep track of them. Also of upcoming legislation may be.
E.g. there are cap-and-trade schemes in regions smaller than a country, like the Canadian province Alberta, the US state of California, and preparations for one in China.
To put a price on emissions is IMHO not only the single most powerful measure (this is at the same time the r e a s o n why nobody wants it), but also it gives a basis for the societal discussion, how much we want to invest in the bottom line into the future of our planet.
The advantage of a c&t scheme is, that the carbon budget approach can directly be taken into account. That is, we can directly decide how much carbon we want to emit in which time period.