Climate change is an important issue to many people, yet support for policies to ameliorate climate change dwindles when the poor and middle class are asked to pay a cost. That is a problem.
Demonstrators wearing yellow vests perform a human tower on the Champs-Elysees avenue Saturday, Dec. 15,2018 in Paris. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu) ASSOCIATED PRESS
While the Yellow Vest protests in France are motivated by more than just opposition to an increase in the tax on gasoline, that proposed gas tax increase was an important rallying point and has now been cancelled by President Macron’s government. These events coinciding with both a new UN report on the worldwide failure to act on climate change and a UN conference hoping to nudge countries toward compliance with the Paris Agreement on climate change point to a huge problem: most policies to slow or halt climate change have costs that fall heaviest on the poor.
While the global elite and some people living in particularly vulnerable locations place great importance on aggressively addressing climate change right now and a majority of those polled around the world agree it is a serious problem, much of the world population in less concerned. Further, climate policy has become entangled with inequality in the opinions of many, with widespread belief it is up to the rich to pay for the necessary steps. In fact, an oft-heard refrain in the French protests was that the rich were not being asked to do their fair share.
Yet, by definition, carbon taxes (and the point of the French gas tax is to tax the carbon emissions from using gasoline) do ask everyone to pay their fair share. A carbon tax is designed to make products that emit carbon more expensive by an amount proportional to the emissions released to the atmosphere.
