PULLMAN, Wash. – A proposal to tax carbon emissions and reduce other taxes in Washington will be discussed by an environmental economist at noon Tuesday, Nov. 12, in Bryan Hall 308, part of the Foley Institute’s Coffee and Politics series. Pizza and pop will be served; please RSVP to relgar@wsu.edu.
British Columbia, Canada has implemented a revenue-neutral tax on carbon emissions to reduce the effect of carbon dioxide on climate change. Revenue-neutral means that little revenue raised by taxing carbon emissions is retained by government; it is returned to the public.
A Washington effort, http://CarbonWA.org, is promoting a B.C.-style swap that would tax carbon emissions while reducing other taxes and funding the Working Families Sales Tax Rebate.
Speaker Yoram Bauman is an environmental economist based in Seattle and a fellow at the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research center focused on Northwest sustainability. He co-authored “Tax Shift” (1998), which helped inspire B.C.’s revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Read more about the B.C. effort at http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/tbs/tp/climate/tax_cuts.htm