On April 1, 2025, Canada killed its national carbon tax. The fuel charge disappeared. The quarterly rebate checks stopped. A family of four in Alberta had been receiving up to $1,800 a year in direct carbon rebate payments. After April, nothing.
Canada was the largest country in the world returning carbon revenue directly to its citizens. The system worked exactly as economists designed it: price the pollution, return the proceeds, let people decide how to spend the money. It was scrapped anyway, after years of political backlash, poor communication, and a government that never figured out how to explain why people were getting checks.
That failure is worth understanding. Not because the principle was wrong, but because it reveals what happens when a carbon dividend depends on one country’s political cycle.
$100 Billion in Rent, Almost None of It Returned
The World Bank’s 2025 carbon pricing report counted 80 carbon pricing instruments operating worldwide. Together, they generated over $100 billion in 2024. That money comes from companies paying to use a shared resource: the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb emissions. In economic terms, it is rent.
The question is where the rent goes.
Almost all of it goes to national budgets. The EU’s Emissions Trading System raised €38.8 billion in 2024. Of the €24.4 billion that went to member states, the money funded renewables, building efficiency, public transport. All useful. None of it was returned to the 450 million people who share the atmosphere the ETS is pricing. The EU charges rent on the air and spends the proceeds on government projects.
Canada was the exception. Two-thirds of its carbon revenue went back to households as equal per-capita payments. Research from Nature Sustainability confirmed what you would expect: uniform dividends receive more public support than earmarking revenues for government projects. People prefer getting the money directly. Canada proved that, and then abandoned it anyway.
The Countries That Still Return It
A few systems still return carbon revenue to people, though the amounts are small.
Switzerland charges CHF 120 per tonne of CO₂ on heating fuels. Two-thirds of the revenue is redistributed equally to every resident through deductions on health insurance premiums. The mechanism is clean: no application and no means test. You live in Switzerland, you get the deduction. But the amount is modest, and it only covers Swiss residents.
California runs cap-and-trade auctions and returns a fraction to households through the Climate Credit. In 2025, a PG&E customer with both electric and gas service received about $183.49 for the year. That is $15 a month. It appears as a line item on your utility bill. Most people do not notice it.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend is not a carbon price, but it follows the same logic: shared resource, public trust, equal payout. In 2025, that was $1,000 per resident. And even Alaska’s legislature has proposed eliminating the dividend entirely.
The pattern is consistent: wherever carbon revenue is returned to people, it is small, fragile, or under threat.
The Problem Is Not the Price. It Is the Boundary.
Eighty jurisdictions now price carbon. That is real progress. But those 80 systems still cover only 28% of global emissions. The other 72% goes unpriced. And all 80 systems stop at their own borders.
The atmosphere does not. A tonne of CO₂ emitted in Jakarta warms the air in Oslo. A factory in Shenzhen raises sea levels in Kiribati. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which entered its compliance phase on January 1, 2026, tries to handle this at the trade boundary: importers of steel, cement, and aluminum now face a carbon price matching the EU’s internal rate. Over 12,000 companies applied for authorization in the first year.
But a border adjustment is not the same as a global price. It protects a domestic carbon market from being undercut by imports. It does not return revenue to the 8 billion people who share the atmosphere. The EU collects the border carbon charge. The EU decides how to spend it.
Switzerland’s dividend is for Swiss residents. California’s credit is for Californians. Canada’s rebate was for Canadians, until it was not. Each system prices a shared global resource and distributes the revenue within one set of borders.
What a Global Carbon Dividend Would Look Like
The principle is already proven. Price the shared input. Collect the rent. Return it to the owners. Switzerland does it. Canada did it. Alaska does it with oil.
The missing step is matching the scale of the revenue to the scale of the input. If the atmosphere belongs to everyone, the rent collected on its use belongs to everyone too. Not because a government decided to be generous, but because shared ownership generates shared returns.
This does not require a world government or a single global carbon price. It requires what is already happening: national carbon pricing systems generating revenue. The difference is where that revenue goes. Right now, $100 billion in atmospheric rent is collected annually, and almost none of it reaches the people who own the asset.
A global carbon dividend would redirect a share of that rent to every person alive. Not as aid. Not as welfare. As a return on a resource that belongs to them.
Canada’s failure was not proof that carbon dividends do not work. It was proof that tying a global principle to one country’s political cycle makes it fragile. The atmosphere does not vote in Canadian elections. The dividend should not depend on them.
The case for building a global commons dividend, starting with carbon, is what I wrote about in “Shareholder at Birth: Keep Your UBI, Give Me What’s Mine,” available March 31.
