Green laws aren't always about saving the planet—they're mostly about what's easiest for the government to measure and tax.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
Carbon Tax vs. Rainforest Tax: Taxability, Regulatory Rent, and the Settlement Engineering of Green Policy
SSRN · 6215018
The Takeaway
The study argues that 'taxability'—the existence of a simple, auditable metric—determines which environmental policies get implemented. This creates a 'carbon dependence' trap where governments focus on emissions because they are easy to count, while ignoring harder-to-measure but vital ecosystems like rainforests.
From the abstract
This paper treats green policy not as a moral narrative but as a settlement problem: how an externality becomes measurable, taxable, and enforceable across borders-then drifts into a fiscal-industrial regime. We propose a "taxability" framework with four necessary conditions (T1-T4): (T1) a unified and auditable metric; (T2) a controllable tax handle with concentrated collection points; (T3) a stable domestic coalition supported by equivalent implementation capacity; and (T4) enforceable spillov