Carbon Tax: A Political Tool or an Impactful Environmental Policy?

Many European states have introduced carbon tax regimes into their national policies, as a way to combat the growing concerns of global warming and climate change. This paper explores the impact of national carbon tax regime in European states on the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced. It does this by comparing carbon tax regimes in Norway, Sweden, and France, in order to understand how each of these regimes works within their respective state and establishes national limitations on the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced. This paper then goes into an analysis of the amount of carbon dioxide produced per capita by all 27 EU member states and Norway, and then compares this average to the carbon dioxide per capita rates of the three case studies, in order to see if the establishment of a carbon tax regime has a direct impact on decreasing the pollution of carbon dioxide. This paper finds that although there are some indications that the establishment of a carbon tax may decrease national carbon dioxide per capita, due to the multisource nature of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon taxes cannot be found to have a direct link to the amount of carbon dioxide per capita that is emitted by a state.