Hi everyone I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Chris Hellman, a senior editor here at

Forbes here to tell us all about carbon tax. Thank you so much for joining me

today Chris.

Good to be here.

So Chris, Elon Musk made a tweet this week saying that the only action needed to

solve climate change was a carbon tax. For starters, what is a carbon tax?

Well, in simplest terms, it's when the government charges you a fee for the amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse

gases that you emit into the atmosphere. Carbon taxes around the world most often take

the form of a tax on fuels that are made out of

hydrocarbons or fossil fuels you know like gasoline or diesel or heating oil so you

know if you'd like to drive a big truck that burns a lot of diesel it it would only make sense that you pay a little bit more of a carbon tax

than someone who uses a plug-in hybrid

Mm-hmm.

And so do we have a carbon tax in the U.S. currently?

Well, not on the federal level, Rosemary, but there is like a patchwork of laws and mandates that states have decided on.

I was looking at an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.

And they were considering the effect

that various rules across the United States have on average and they

said it comes out to about five dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

That's about like where the you know all this bundle of taxes and

regulation stands today. But you know California has a lot of other rules that

govern the kind of fuel that gas stations can sell.

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