Officials expect to collect about $1.1 million per year from the fee, with most of that coming from the 10 largest polluters, who together will pay more than $800,000. The largest Bay Area emitter — a Shell oil refinery — would have to pay $195,355 based on its 2005 emissions of 4.4 million metric tons.
The majority of businesses will pay less than $1 per year for their CO2 emissions.
“It doesn’t solve global warming, but it gets us thinking in the right terms,” Daniel Kammen, a renewable energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told the AP. “It’s not enough of a cost to change behavior, but it tells us where things are headed. You have to think not just in financial terms, but in carbon terms.”