Barack Obama Quotes

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.

Recently though, our State Governments have discussed instigating a carbon trading scheme - the details are still to be decided - and that's an encouraging sign.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

If the world is to avoid a collision with nature - one that humanity surely cannot win - we must act boldly on every front, particularly with respect to carbon pricing and the coherence of our economic and energy policies.

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

I do not believe we can effectively move Australia to a lower emission economy, which is what we need to do if we're going to make a contribution to a global reduction in greenhouse gases, without putting a price on carbon.

When you look at the social cost of carbon - and there is a lot of ambiguity around that - what you also need to be doing is looking at the benefits of carbon and what that has on increased agriculture production.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it.

And then of course, obviously as far as issues such as global warming, something has to be done on the corporate side, there has to be some mandate or some legislation.

Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.

Society has to get a grip and put a tax on carbon. Of course, there is much that flows from that, and it is a complex situation. The small details of something such as climate change are political and social, and they are a lot about fairness and how we rebalance towards a fairer society.

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

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

As is widely accepted, putting a price on carbon pollution is the lowest cost and most efficient way to tackle dangerous climate change.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.

There are philosophical issues involved in that about choosing the right discount rate, the value, the future, and things like that which drive it. But its start with the premise that global warming is real and if you're a denier of that fact, then you're not going to find climate change mitigation policies to have particular appeal.

A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.

Climate change is here. We have to learn how to deal with it.

We now know beyond a doubt that global warming is a reality. And the question we must all answer is, what are we going to do about it?

We need a crash program to decarbonize the economy, a big ask, but nothing less will save us.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.

The Liberal carbon tax is just about raising revenue for government.