Some Inconvenient Truths about Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies

• Main Authors: Holland, Stephen P. (Author), Hughes, Jonathan E. (Author), Parker, Nathan C. (Author), Knittel, Christopher Roland (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Sloan School of Management (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MIT Press, 2016-03-28T19:13:26Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Climate policy has favored costly measures that implicitly or explicitly subsidize lowcarbon fuels.We simulate four transportation sector policies: cap and trade (CAT), ethanol subsidies, a renewable fuel standard (RFS), and a lowcarbon fuel standard. Our simulations confirm that alternatives to CAT are 2.5 to 4 times more costly but are amenable to adoption due to right-skewed distributions of gains. We analyze voting on the Waxman-Markey (WM) CAT bill. Conditional on a district's CAT gains, a district's RFS gains are negatively correlated with the likelihood of voting for WM. Our analysis supports campaign contributions as a partial mechanism.
University of California, Davis. Institute of Transportation Studies