Because the total amount of excess emissions for those countries exceeding their assigned amounts would be very large, especially at the outset, even a very small fee per ton would aggregate sizable sums of money. Offering these significant sums as prize money to breakthrough innovators would trigger a world-wide race for the cure, involving all sorts of imaginative consortia. Such a fee would be immediately attacked as a carbon tax, which it is. But its minute level combined with its enormous potential leverage to genuinely abate a problem of material concern would raise its political prospects. Polling in the U.S. has shown that the general public is more receptive to taxes tied to particular worthy objectives than it is to taxes for general government support.
Environmental quality ranks high among such objectives.
Support for green taxes in Europe is at least as strong. The second front on which progress must be made to address the European Group's concern with effectiveness is building confidence that an emissions market will actually work as the textbooks say. No individual country has embraced market-based mechanisms as the principal solution to its domestic environmental challenges. It is fair to question whether a complex global issue like climate change is the right place to undertake the next real-world test of market performance. For an emissions market to be remotely credible, major investments must be made in the capacity of the parties to measure, report and enforce emissions and trading performance.