The tax-and-dividend approach to global warming (which sets a price on carbon emissions, charges producers for those emissions, and redistributes the proceeds as a basic income), has been gaining ground since its endorsement by a conference on pricing carbon held at Wesleyan University (Connecticut) on November 20, 2010.

Peter Barnes, who has led the push for tax and dividend for years, has recently suggested a program, modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, called the Sky Trust, to redistribute proceeds from carbon taxes and redistribute the money to taxpayers electronically. According to Judith D. Schwartz, of Miller-McCune, said, “This is a strong argument why dividend is the way to go … It also gets the discussion out of the tax box, which is a very bad box to be in.” Schwartz quotes climate activist Bill McKibben saying that a price-and-dividend model could be extremely important to a serious program to address global warming. It could even be the “tool that can bend that political reality. It’s hard to bend political reality. But it’s harder to bend chemistry and physics.”

“Pricing Carbon to Reduce Emissions, Create Dividends,” Miller-McCune, May 19, 2011, by Judith D. Schwartz is online at:
https://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/pricing-carbon-to-reduce-emissions-create-dividends-31344/

A statement of principle from the conference at Wesleyan University as online at:
https://www.pricingcarbon.org/Yohe_11_20_10.pdf