Some Inconvenient Truths about Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Holland, Stephen P.; Hughes, Jonathan E.; Knittel, Christopher R.; Parker, Nathan C.
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Greensboro; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of California System; University of California Davis
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00452
• 发表日期: 2015-12
• 页码: 1052-1069
• 关键词: POLITICAL-ECONOMY; new-deal; STANDARDS

摘要

Climate policy has favored costly measures that implicitly or explicitly subsidize lowcarbon fuels.We simulate four transportation sector policies: cap and trade (CAT), ethanol subsidies, a renewable fuel standard (RFS), and a lowcarbon fuel standard. Our simulations confirm that alternatives to CAT are 2.5 to 4 times more costly but are amenable to adoption due to right-skewed distributions of gains. We analyze voting on the Waxman-Markey (WM) CAT bill. Conditional on a district's CAT gains, a district's RFS gains are negatively correlated with the likelihood of voting for WM. Our analysis supports campaign contributions as a partial mechanism.