Aldy quoted in The New Yorker on why Republicans can't support a carbon tax
“It’s fascinating to me to look at the partisan evolution of this issue over the past decade,” Joseph Aldy, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who previously worked on carbon pricing for the Obama Administration, told me. “In 2003, the leader in the Senate on climate change was John McCain. And, if you fast-forward to 2008, there wasn’t much debate on climate change, because then-Senator McCain and then-Senator Obama had almost identical, ambitious cap-and-trade proposals to tackle the problem.” Ryan Lizza has written in the magazine about what happened next. In short, a confluence of the Great Recession, garden-variety partisanship, and, finally, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill served to kill whatever momentum had built on the issue.
