Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax is Good for America.

• Date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Alberini, Anna

Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax is Good for America, by Gilbert E. Metcalf (Oxford University Press, 2019), 188 pages, ISBN: 978-0-19-069419-7 (hardback)

In the spring semester, I teach an upper-level undergraduate course in the Economics of Climate Change at the University of Maryland. This year, for the first time, I decided to suggest selected chapters of this book as additional readings about the carbon tax. (The main textbooks for the course are Richard Tol's book, and Joseph Romm's book about climate change, which explains the physics, social consequences, and policy tools of climate change in very simple terms.) I was hoping to discuss the Metcalf book chapters briefly with my students during class time. Then COVID-19 came, we switched to online instruction, and I have had to make adjustments to my course, replacing the discussions with problem sets.

As an admirer of professor Metcalf's work, which I cite very frequently in my own papers, I read this book with curiosity and pleasure. I should probably warn you that professor Metcalf's book does not replace a regular textbook on environmental economics or the economics of climate change. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the causes and likely consequences of climate change (covered briefly in chapter 1), as well as a pollution tax and cap-and-trade systems.

The book (chapter 3), however, does cover in detail the notion of a (negative) externality, using a historical example from 1860, namely the lawsuit that Dr. Sturges, a London-based physician, brought against a Mr. Bridgman, a neighbor...