Visualizing the Statewide Impact of a Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax
Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1256082. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this materialare those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
We envision using online tools to introduce information into the political sphere in ways that are transparent and fair, and that hold the producers of facts accountable for the information they provide. As a prototypical example, we are developing an online calculator for a revenue-neutral carbon tax proposal in the state of Washington. The data visualization discussed here is one of the features of this tool aimed at facilitating voters' understanding of the policy and its impacts. We hope that features such as these will provide a basis of information from which democratic processes can proceed more effectively. Following the tradition of exploratory visualizations, our tool allows users to find their own insights from a large body of data using various filtering options and both broad and specific views of the data.
Software
Try it online here.