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Climate change and the set of policies that are motivated by it have become one of the most salient issues in American society and politics. Survey evidence from 2020 indicates that 60 percent of Americans feel that climate change is a major threat to the United States and 52 percent believe that addressing climate change should be a top policy priority (Kennedy, 2020). Growing concern related to climate change, combined with the election of President Joe Biden and Democratic control of both chambers of Congress, suggest that the coming years may be a pivotal era for climate policy in the United States.

The elevated importance of climate change has coincided with new discussions about the way in which climate policy should be structured. For many years, policy debates focused directly on climate change have, in large part, involved enacting a price on carbon, which could be implemented either through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system. Within the U.S., interest in a carbon price perhaps peaked in 2009 with the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 (i.e., “Waxman-Markey” bill), which included the creation of an emissions trading scheme. The bill passed the House but was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

Most recently, the policy focus has shifted toward the “Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal (GND), as embodied through a nonbinding House resolution (H.Res.109; 116th Congress) sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, is an aspirational plan calling for aggressive change throughout the economy related to mitigating climate change and addressing other societal problems, most notably economic inequality and systemic injustice. Carbon pricing is not mentioned in the resolution, which instead focuses on setting ambitious goals. Among other items, the resolution calls for 1) “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”; 2) “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification”; 3) “removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible”; and 4) “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible.” The focus of these goals on zero or technology-based thresholds, as well as the absence of carbon pricing within the resolution, indicates that carbon mitigation policies under a GND-approach would likely take place through regulatory mandates, such as standards for power production, energy efficiency, and transportation.

The relevance of the GND to recent discussions related to climate change is hard to overstate. It certainly has become more prominent than a carbon tax or cap-and-trade and more readily embraced by politicians. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders, who featured a carbon tax in his 2016 presidential campaign, eschewed a carbon price for a climate policy centered around the GND during his 2020 campaign. President Biden's administration has also embraced at least a modified version of the GND approach to climate policy and one of the leading candidates to head the EPA under the Biden Administration, Mary Nichols, was reportedly removed from consideration in part due to her previous support for carbon pricing in California (Davenport, 2020). These political trends are also reflected in the interest of the public. For example, Google Trends data, which capture Google search volumes for different topics reveal that carbon pricing experienced a surge in interest around the time of the Waxman-Markey bill, but it has subsequently declined; meanwhile, interest in the GND surged in 2019 and remained elevated relative to carbon pricing in 2020 (Figure 1).