TAXING POWER DELEGATION FOR BETTER ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION: A PROPOSAL ON FEDERAL CARBON TAX POLICY MAKING.

In view of the stalled situation in climate change lawmaking, transferring the focus from direct congressional lawmaking to delegated lawmaking by agencies may provide a new perspective to break the gridlock of federal carbon tax legislation. However, taxes are generally less delegable than environmental and other regulations. Specifically, the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury are not permitted to determine tax rates. This is also the case for environmental taxes in the Internal Revenue Code. Though some environmental statutes seem to provide some implied and untested delegation of power to regulate by taxation, the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") has not yet imposed any environmental taxes under such delegation. This Article argues for expanding the delegation of environmental taxes to realize their regulatory purposes and proposes to delegate the EPA the power to determine and adjust carbon tax rates. A comparative study of Chinese legislation and U.S. delegating power illustrates the need for delegating environmental taxing power. The National People's Congress of China has considered the regulatory purpose in expanding the delegation of tax rates and tax base in the new Environmental Protection Tax Law. This new law provides a valuable reference to the U.S. EPA's regulatory mission. Delegating the power to determine carbon tax rates advances the EPA's regulatory mission due to its comparative advantages of expertise in environmental policymaking, flexibility to the uncertainty, volatility of the climate change issue, and coordination of environmental policy instruments. The regulatory nature of environmental taxes weakens the distributional and transfer-of-property concern, ultimately justifying the legitimacy of environmental tax delegation. Moreover, the EPA is likely to be more responsive than Congress in producing urgently needed, but politically unpopular, carbon tax. Finally, this article concludes that the proposal to delegate carbon tax rates is constitutional based on the Origination Clause, the non-delegation doctrine, and potential non-tax-delegation doctrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]