A new UN video on climate change explains how carbon pricing can help advance a transition to a low-carbon future. The video features an MIT Joint Program/National Renewable Energy Laboratoray (NREL) study in the journal Climate Change Economics showing how a carbon tax can both accelerate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and be fair and not hurt low-income households.
The study's researchers (former MIT postdoc Justin Caron, MIT Joint Program Co-Director Emeritus John Reilly, and Stuart Cohen and Maxwell Brown of NREL) performed the analysis by linking a computational general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy (MIT’s U.S. Regional Energy Policy (USREP) model) with a detailed model (NREL’s Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS)) of the electricity sector, the largest source of U.S. CO2 emissions.
More information about the study can be found in this MIT News story.