Environmental Tax Incentives
An alternative to taxing environmental “bads” is to provide tax relief for environmental “goods”. The
tax system can be used to subsidise environmentally beneficial goods or actions by, for example, VAT
exemptions for energy-efficient appliances or favourable depreciation rates for capital investments in
renewable energy or pollution abatement.
Like other subsidies, however, tax expenditures have a number of important limitations:
Since it is difficult to subsidise all the environmentally beneficial alternatives to the harmful activity,
tax subsidies inevitably involve “picking winners”, which may prejudice other good alternatives. For
example, unlike a tax on road fuel, a subsidy for low-emission vehicles does not provide any incentive
for commuters to consider alternative forms of transportation such as public transit or cycling.
By reducing costs, tax subsidies may indirectly increase pollution. For instance, unlike a tax on
vehicle emissions or road fuel, a subsidy for hybrid electric vehicles may encourage people to drive
more.