How can we enhance green tax policies that break the policy gridlock between climate action and social acceptability?

This project provides policymakers a tangible evidence basis on how to design a mix of policy measures to meet EU emission targets in a socially acceptable way, with a particular focus on thorough tax reforms.

Insights

COVID-19 induced redistribution of street space in EU cities caused large increases in cycling Do investments in infrastructure for active travel lead to more sustainable, climate friendly transport behavior or is it just expensive symbolic politics? The rollout of pop-up bike lanes during the pandemic is a unique empirical context to test this. We show large increases in cycling with major health benefits in a study published in the renowned science journal PNAS.
CO2 standards & green subsidies do not have distributional benefits over carbon taxes Does transport climate policy have to lead to higher fuel prices, or are there more socially acceptable policies, such as efficiency standards, electric vehicle subsidies or driving bans? We compare the distributional effects of these alternatives and show that a carbon price with a per-capita refund is by far the fairest way of climate protection in transport.
Energy savings from working-from-home of the richest are twice as high as those of the poorest The COVID-19 pandemic created the largest experiment in working from home. We study how persistent telework may change energy and transport consumption and costs in Germany to assess the distributional and environmental implications when working from home will stick.
The German transport sector is not on track to meet its emission reduction targets Our research for the German Council of Experts on Climate Change uses anonymized GPS vehicle data and mobile phone data to show that the transport sector would have missed its emission target by about 10 million tons of CO2 without the COVID-19 pandemic. (Study available in German only)