Passing the check: How overlapping climate policies shift the distribution of costs in California
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Energy and transportation services represent a significant portion of household budgets, particularly for low-income households. Climate policies that increase the cost of energy and transportation services can lead to disparate impacts across income and demographic groups. When multiple overlapping climate policies are in place, they may interact to compound or shift the distribution of costs. This study employs household expenditure microdata from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the distributional costs of two overlapping policies in California: the cap-and-trade program (CAT) and the low carbon fuel standard (LCFS). Findings indicate that the LCFS is regressive and that the CAT, while highly regressive at initial incidence, is similar in net incidence to the LCFS after returning some revenue to households through utility rebates. Yet the CAT program leads to greater differences in impacts on households within income groups, even exceeding differences between groups. Interactions between the two policies lead to higher costs for households across income deciles compared to achieving the same level of emissions reduction with the CAT alone. This suggests there is no equity-efficiency tradeoff in choosing between these policy instruments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".