The Politics of American and Canadian Carbon Pricing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A vast economics literature embraces taxation of the content of fossil fuels as the superior policy approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing other major energy policy goals. However, national government experience around the world suggests that taxes face exceedingly difficult political hurdles. Federal experience in the United States and Canada confirms this pattern. This paper reviews sub-federal policy development among American states and Canadian provinces, a great many of whom have been active in climate policy development. With one notable exception, it concludes that explicit taxation appears to remain a political non-starter. At the same time, states and provinces have been placing indirect prices on fossil fuel use through a wide range of policies over the past fifteen years. These tend to strategically alter labeling, finding different ways to characterize new or expanded policies by avoiding the terms of tax and carbon in imposing costs. The paper offers a framework for considering such a diverse set of strategies and examines common design features, including direct linkage between cost imposition and fund usage to build political support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".