Proposes a framework for a US climate policy with border adjustments based on an upstream tax on GHG emissions with rebates for exports and charges on imports for products from energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries.
Reviews past border carbon adjustment proposals and offers design principals and recommendations on questions of product coverage, sectoral coverage, adjustment levels, and revenues usage.
Explores the basic architecture of a carbon border tax adjustment, as well as complications including rebates to US exporters and how to credit exporting countries for their own carbon regimes.
Addresses issues relating to the creation of border carbon adjustments as part of a carbon tax, including what traded goods should be subject, when should the adjustment be reduced or suspended, and how should revenues and expenditures be managed.
Finds that, at recent oil prices of $50 per barrel, tax subsidies push nearly half of new, yet-to-be-developed oil investments into profitability, potentially increasing US oil production by 17 billion barrels over the next few decades.
Would have amended several sections of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to eliminate subsidies aimed specifically at the fossil fuel industry.
Would amend the Internal Revenue Code to replace the 44 existing energy tax credits with three technology neutral tax provisions that would incentivize the use of low and zero emissions technologies.
Identifies eight different active direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code, as well as recent legislative efforts to eliminate them.
Identifies twelve provisions in the tax code that subsidize activities associated with the production of fossil fuels that impose an estimated $41.4 billion ten-year revenue loss on the federal treasury.
Catalogs federal and state fossil fuel subsidies, and identifies opportunities to eliminate them. Appendix 1 provides a complete list of U.S. federal and state fossil fuel production subsidies, which it argues amount to approximately $20 billion.