The chair of Alberta’s climate change advisory panel on what he wishes its final report had said about the economic impact of carbon pricing Andrew Leach

...we know that pricing carbon in Alberta isn’t going to solve climate change. We know that climate change is a global collective action problem—when we burn fossil fuels, we impose costs (quantified as the social costs of carbon) on others—a burden for which we do not have to pay compensation. This is what economists know as an externality, and it leads to a less efficient overall outcome than you’d have with perfect markets. The Alberta economy, with some of the highest emissions per capita in the world, has benefited significantly from the fact that current and future generations of global citizens can’t easily send us a bill (or sue us costlessly for damages, if you prefer a Coasian view of the world).  Economic activity in Alberta emits, on average, 62 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per person per year, which implies a cost imposed on others of $,2800 to $4,500 annually per Albertan using the U.S. government’s central estimates of the social costs of carbon emissions, converted to Canadian dollars.
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