The Boulder, Colorado, City Council is considering placing an emissions-based fee on cars that run on fossil fuels in order to fight climate change, The Denver Post reported.
The city is projected to run a $4.4 million annual deficit between 2020 to 2025 if the city government cannot pull in more money to fund its transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 and an 80 percent reduction in city-wide emissions by 2050.
Officials considering the proposal suggested a new tax of 0.11 percent of the value of a gas or diesel vehicle and 0.05 percent of the value of a hybrid. Electric vehicle owners would not pay anything. The tax would amount to around $15 a year for a “typical” vehicle and bring in about $1 million annual to the city, offsetting but not eliminating the projected deficit, officials told The Denver Post.
Various state and local governments in the U.S. are considering ways to cut down on emissions in the transportation sector. A couple of the most common fixes are implementing taxes on gas and carbon emissions. (RELATED: Here’s Why Californians Pay Way More For Gas Than Everyone Else)
A Washington proposal, backed by Bill Gates, would implement a carbon emissions tax of $15 per metric ton of emissions, equivalent to around 13 cents per gallon of gas. California’s legislature recently increased its gas tax to the second highest in the nation behind New York. The United Nations’s climate change board, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, proposed instituting a $240 per gallon gas tax to curb global emissions in an Oct. 8 report.
(L-R) Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s Minister of Environment, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chairman Rajendra Pachauri and Renate Christ, Secretary of the IPCC present the AR5 Synthesis Report during a news conference in Copenhagen, Nov. 2, 2014. Governments can keep climate change in check at manageable costs but will have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2100 to limit fast-worsening risks, a U.N. report showed on Sunday. The 40-page synthesis, summing up 5,000 pages of work by 800 scientists already published since September 2013, said global warming was now causing more heat extremes, downpours, acidifying the oceans and pushing up sea levels. REUTERS/Niels Ahlmann Olesen/Scanpix Denmark
Other cities and countries around the world have taken a more drastic step by banning fossil fuel-powered cars entirely. Britain announced in 2017 that it would ban the sale of new diesel and gas cars by 2040. Denmark is proposing a bill that would ban the sale of all gas-powered cars, including hybrids, by 2035. Paris wants to institute its own ban by 2030.
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