Lawrence Summers Quotes

For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

Well, I'm not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.

Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour.

I say just put a big fat tax on carbon.

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes.

This Bush administration has a growing credibility gap, maybe even a credibility chasm, on environmental policy. The President has lost the trust of the American people when it comes to the environment.

Republicans are for clean water, clean air, and clean energy. We are not for taxing people out of their house, home and business to pay for it. And that is the fundamental difference between the Democrats and Republicans on this issue.

Putting a tax on carbon could be an effective approach for curbing global warming pollution.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.

I'm a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.

It's time we stopped ignoring the environment. Let's not let another election go by without making this a high priority.

We should tax what we burn, not what we earn.

A carbon tax by itself would make driving more expensive, that's very true. But in exchange for that, there are going to be more jobs, more output, more employment, and more products available. So really, as long as you're going to collect the revenues you're going to collect, you're going to have to trade off one tax for the other.

Part of what the carbon tax does is make Canada less competitive.

I can tell you that a carbon tax will be a total economic disaster.

The Liberals would love to have people believe that the choice is a carbon tax or nothing. I reject that.

As a California state legislator, I supported our cap-and-trade law to force polluters to pay for releasing harmful greenhouse gases to combat climate change.

Canadians didn't vote for a carbon tax. Justin Trudeau campaigned, promised that he wouldn't create a carbon tax.

Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.

Most Americans are more concerned about the economy and job creation. And they can't understand why the Obama administration or the Democrat majority in Congress wants to pass a bill like the cap-and-trade tax that will cost us jobs, that will hurt our economy, that will drive up costs for families, as well as for small businesses.

I've always been a strong supporter of environmental protection and initiatives in that area. But I'm willing to set priorities. If we have to make reductions in one place, we'll have to-in order to increase another place, I'm willing to do that.

The lesson for the next U.S. president: Raise the taxes on fuel. A lot.

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.

Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.