Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Long considered the biggest holdout in climate change negotiations, China said this week that the country would implement new taxes designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Officials in Beijing provided few details, but a report by the state-owned Xinhua news service suggested that the government is working on a relatively modest plan.

Climate change experts such as James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and many economists have long argued that the best way to stop and reverse global warming is to phase in taxes on the release of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The taxes would work by penalizing big emitters, thus encouraging consumers and businesses to reduce their use of electricity and gasoline. Over time, emissions would come down. And global temperatures, which have been increasing since the industrial revolution, would stabilize or decline preventing a big rise in sea levels, heat waves and other climate change calamities.

But with rare exceptions, including Ireland and British Columbia, few governments have been willing to implement such taxes for fear that they would hurt their economies, especially in relation to other, laxer countries. Many American lawmakers have been hostile to the idea of a carbon tax and other policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.



The Xinhua report about China’s plans did not say how big a tax the country would impose, but it pointed to a three-year-old proposal by government experts that would have levied a 10-yuan ($1.60) per ton tax on carbon in 2012 and raised it to 50-yuan ($8) a ton by 2020. Those prices are far below the $80 (500-yuan) a ton that some experts have suggested would be needed to achieve “climate stability,” and which would raise the cost of gasoline by about 70 American cents a gallon.

China’s plan will not make a serious dent in global warming, though the tax may still have some beneficial impact within the country, where air pollution is a serious problem. A paper from the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning suggests that a small tax could still raise revenue and provide an incentive to reduce emissions, bolstering China’s renewable energy industry.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., many members of Congress find the idea of carbon taxes totally anathema and think such taxes would wreck the economy. They might, however, want to consider a proposal promoted by Mr. Hansen that would take the money collected from carbon taxes — or carbon fees as he prefers to call them — and rebate it in full to individuals. That would help consumers pay for more expensive electricity and gasoline, while giving them an incentive to cut their use of energy and fossil fuels. It’s an elegant way to limit damage to the economy while giving people incentives to do what is right for the planet.