Dan Kammen, professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a climate adviser to the Obama administration, discusses the potential of a carbon tax at the recent Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM7) conference in San Francisco.
“If we really want to bend the curve to make the transition, we need everyone to speak the same language — not always to agree, but to talk about things in the same way," said Kammen. "You just can’t get environmentalists and business leaders and elected officials to do that unless we’re valuing and pricing out the impacts. Carbon tax will get us there."
Kammen contends that the U.S. government could get the carbon tax ball rolling by making carbon accounting a "business requirement" for all federal contracts.
