Carbon tax

Summary

A carbon tax is a tax levied on the carbon emissions required to produce goods and services. Carbon taxes are intended to make visible the "hidden" social costs of carbon emissions, which are otherwise felt only in indirect ways like more severe weather events. In this way, they are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing prices of the fossil fuels that emit them when burned. This both decreases demand for goods and services that produce high emissions and incentivizes making them less carbon-intensive. In its simplest form, a carbon tax covers only CO2 emissions; however, it could also cover other greenhouse gases, such as methane or nitrous oxide, by taxing such emissions based on their CO2-equivalent global warming potential. When a hydrocarbon fuel such as coal, petroleum, or natural gas is burned, most or all of its carbon is converted to CO2. Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, which damages the environment and human health. This negative externalit

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax

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Conception of a biological activated carbon filter for micropollutants removal in wastewater

Solène Gomez

The presence of micro pollutants in water is an important emerging problem because of their negative impacts on health and environment. The Swiss Federal Office of the Environment is planning to impose new regulations to reduce the load of micro pollutants in waste water. This paper assesses the use of biological activated carbon (BAC) to treat micro pollutants from small waste water treatment plant (WWTP). In a first part, articles were consulted to evaluate the state of the art of BAC filters: their properties, efficiencies, costs as well as the impact of parameters such as the empty bed contact time (EBCT), aeration and backwashing. In a second part, two BAC filters were designed for implementation in WWTP (Vidy, Lausanne, Switzerland) and laboratory. The dimensioned BAC filter for the WWTP has an EBCT of 90 min and treats 1.7 L day-1. The proposed carbon is the ‘DCL-G’ carbon type. Feed water is pumped from the aeration tank of the Vidy WWTP and rejected before the existing granular activated carbon filter. Backwashing consists in stirring the top layer of carbon bed weekly and no aeration is needed for the proposed implementation. Dissolved organic carbon and micro pollutants monitoring is planned. The BAC filters are expected to remove 90% of micro pollutants treated below a concentration of 10 ng L-1.

2013

Assessment of acceptable Swiss post-2012 climate policies

Juan Carlos Altamirano Cabrera, André Sceia, Marc Vielle

In the framework of the revision of the Swiss CO2-Law and in view for the international negotiations that will take place at the next Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) has proposed a set of instruments and two levels of abatement to define the Swiss climate policy for the post-2012 period. The proposed policies are the results of a consultation procedure that took place at the beginning of 2009 and has allowed major stakeholders and lobbies to defend their interests. Using a hybrid model, we evaluate two proposed scenarios at the 2030 horizon and find important disparities in the prices of carbon faced by the different economic sectors and higher welfare costs than those that would be triggered by a uniform carbon tax.

2009

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NCCR-Climate2009