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

Stephen Holland, Jonathan Hughes (), Christopher Knittel and Nathan C. Parker ()
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Nathan C. Parker: University of California, Davis

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 5, 1052-1069

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: climate; policy; subsidy; transportation; gains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H23 Q58 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Some Inconvenient Truths About Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies (2011)
Working Paper: Some Inconvenient Truths About Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies (2011)
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