Some environmental groups are supporting a new bill to combat climate change that would “block all future lease sales for coal, oil, natural gas, and other energy development on federal land.” Additionally, a group of Senate Democrats recently asked the Obama administration to tackle the issue; they suggested charging a fee to the companies mining federal coal.
“Federal coal seems like a logical target for launching an upstream carbon pricing policy,” according to RFF’s Alan Krupnick, Nathan Richardson, and Joel Darmstadter. In recent research, they write: “Such a policy would signal the Obama administration’s intent to reduce CO2 emissions . . . and it would set the precedent for a future, more substantive upstream charge on emissions, broadly applied to all coal and fossil fuels.”
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