Putting a price on producing carbon is the cheapest, most efficient policy change legislators can make to reduce emissions that cause climate change, new research suggests.
The case study, published recently in the journal Current Sustainable/Renewable Energy Reports, analyzed the costs and effects that a variety of policy changes would have on reducing carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in Texas and found that adding a price, based on the cost of climate change, to carbon was the most effective.
“If the goal is reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what we found is that putting a price on carbon and then letting suppliers and consumers make their production and consumption choices accordingly is much more effective than other policies,” said Ramteen Sioshansi, senior author of the study, Sustainability Institute affiliated faculty member and an integrated systems engineering professor at The Ohio State University.
The study did not examine how policy changes might affect the reliability of the Texas power system – an issue that became acute and painful for Texas residents last month when a winter storm caused the state’s power grid to go down.
But it did evaluate other policies, including mandates that a certain amount of energy in a region’s energy portfolio come from renewable sources, and found that they were either more expensive or not as effective as carbon taxes at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Subsidies for renewable energy sources were the also not as effective at reducing carbon dioxide, the study found.