Energy modeling study reveals that carbon fees accelerate emissions cuts and lower fiscal costs in the United States, indicating viable policy pathways toward mid-decade climate targets.
The year 2025 could be a crucial one for climate policy in the United States. Using an integrated model of energy supply and demand, this paper aims to assess climate policies that the US federal government may consider in 2025 and to evaluate emissions reductions, abatement costs, fiscal impacts, and household energy expenditures across a range of policy scenarios. The model results show several key findings. First, the emissions reductions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are significantly augmented under scenarios that add a modest carbon fee or, to a lesser extent, implement a clean electricity standard in the power sector. Second, net fiscal costs can be substantially reduced in scenarios that include a carbon fee, especially if fossil fuel exports are taxed. Third, expanding the IRA tax credits yields modest additional emissions reductions with higher fiscal costs. Fourth, although none of the policy combinations across these scenarios achieves the US target of a 50%–52% economy-wide emissions reduction by 2030 from 2005 levels, the carbon fee and clean electricity standard scenarios achieve these levels between 2030 and 2035. Finally, rolling back regulations and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act provisions would generate fiscal savings, but these actions would substantially reduce US emissions reductions.
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Bistline et al. (2025) studied this question.
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