How to Reduce Emission

Two of the most common methods of controlling and reducing emissions are incentives and penalties. Theses incentives and penalties can affect everyone from the general public to large, multinational companies. An example of such incentive could be to reward those who use more green methods in their everyday life or for their company as a whole. For example, if a company uses solar power to power their offices they could be rewarded with tax breaks or a point gaining system. Such systems are used for less frequently than penalty systems but could prove more popular and encourage people to make a change.

Penalty systems are used quite frequently in order to control many factors, including emissions. One of the main penalty methods is pigouvian tax; this basically taxes the consumer or producer involved in negative externalities. For example, if it was found that a gallon of fuel caused $5 of damage to the environment, the government could impose a tax of $5 per gallon to be charged either to the producer or consumer. This works two ways, first it would deter people from over usage or waste as they are being charged more. Second, the money made from tax could be used for other emission reducing projects.

The most efficient approaches to reducing emissions involve giving businesses and individuals an incentive to curb activities that produce CO2 emissions, rather than adopting a "command and control" approach in which the government would mandate how much individual entities could emit or what technologies they should use. Incentive- based approaches can reduce emissions at a lower cost than more restrictive command and control approaches because they provide more flexibility about where and how emission reductions are achieved.