Getting energy prices right: from principle to practice

Increasing concern over climate change has pushed environmental taxation up the political and economic agenda. This book shows the importance of taxation in combating climate change and other environmental problems and also shows how these policies can be put into practice and what this would mean for revenue, public health and emissions. This is essentially a political document and will be used by the IMF to impose, like carbon taxes, conditions on nations borrowing money. This type of coercive and paternalistic policy might have worked well while the U.S. was the dominant world economy, and Western Europe and the U.S. had similar goals. Further, the spending of the fiscal dividend from carbon taxes would give governments vast new powers, thereby increasing the role of government in the lives of people, and decreasing personal freedom.