Elon Musk Calls for Carbon Price to Halve the Transition Time to Clean Energy

Opinions, Policy

December 4, 2015

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by Lenore Taylor (The Guardian) Businessman and innovator says a scheme similar to the one Australia abandoned would make a huge difference in tackling climate change — Addressing students at the Sorbonne University on the sidelines of the Paris climate summit, the electric car, powerwall battery and space tycoon said he believed a phased-in carbon price would halve the time it took the world to transition to clean energy, something that would make a huge difference to dangerous climate change.

The obvious solution to runaway global warming was to remove the effective subsidy of not pricing the damage done by carbon pollution, Musk said, urging the students to lobby governments to implement the policy.

“To make it neither a left nor right issue we should make it a revenue-neutral carbon tax – increasing carbon tax and reducing tax in other areas like consumption taxes or VAT and in order to give companies time to react it should be a phased-in approach,” he said.

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“For developing economies they could leapfrog the fossil fuel situation with power lines, you could have remote villages with solar panels and a battery pack, just like mobile phones, a lot of countries just didn’t do the landlines, they skipped right over landlines.”

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The businessman and inventor warned that getting rid of the “hidden carbon subsidy … of enormous size, $5.3tn a year according to the IMF” would continue to encounter tactics by fossil fuel companies similar to those used by the tobacco industry for many years. READ MORE

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