The Ethics of Pollution Pricing

We survey various ethical issues related to the use of pollution pricing. While pollution pricing, for example in the form of Pigouvian taxes or cap-and-trade systems, is widely used in environmental economics modeling, many moral and ethical assumptions lie behind those models, and many ethical objections to pollution pricing are disregarded. We hope this review will be helpful to environmental economists who are regularly engaged in the use of such models, and in economic reasoning more generally, but who are less familiar with their ethical underpinnings and possible implications.