Carbon Pricing As Financial Risk Management – If It Is Inclusive Enough . .

policymakers must be sensitive to the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and other policies and ensure that the burden does not fall on low-to-moderate income households and on historically marginalized communities.

This is such an important and true point, but it would be disingenuous to use it as a reason to throw out any and all carbon pricing. Carbon pricing policies need to be built smartly and deliberately, but I fear those who stand to lose because of carbon pricing will hammer home the equity issues (which are valid issues) without looking to work towards a solution where carbon pricing can build in mechanisms to offset those potential negative impacts. 

There is empirical evidence from Alberta showing that Carbon Pricing fails to deliver on its promise to rapidly increase clean energy solutions and raises energy costs to consumers, even as consumption drops. The CFTC report fails to consider other options to address climate change, focusing solely on Carbon Pricing as the "prudent" approach, as shown in the following excerpt.

"But, because the future is very uncertain, society today should err on the side of caution. In the context of pricing climate risk, that implies imposing a higher price than what models used to calculate the social cost of carbon currently suggest. Prudent risk management calls for immediately implementing carbon pricing globally to quickly reduce GHG emissions and to try to get the planet to net-zero emissions as soon as possible while ensuring that the costs are shared equitably across society and that the distributional impacts are not regressive. Of course, policy should respond to new information over time, and it is very likely that circumstances will require that we need to go beyond net-zero and pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere."

If the goal is to genuinely mitigate the effects of climate change, there are indeed other, more effective, options to consider