The abandonment of carbon pricing in North America: a short-sighted retreat analysed through ethical security economics

Abstract North America is retreating from carbon pricing at the precise moment when its necessity is most acute. In March 2025, Canada eliminated its federal consumer carbon tax, and the United States has dismantled the regulatory architecture for greenhouse gas regulation, including revoking the foundational 2009 EPA endangerment finding. This paper asks three questions: (1) how does the North American retreat constitute an ethical failure when evaluated through ethical security economics? (2) What does international comparative evidence reveal about the conditions under which carbon pricing succeeds? (3) What structural reforms would render carbon pricing ethically grounded and politically durable? We apply ethical security economics, a values-based framework grounding economic evaluation in five interrelated principles (sustainability, justice, peace, compassion, and authenticity with accuracy), to analyse these concurrent policy reversals. We contrast North America’s retreat with European jurisdictions where carbon pricing has been associated with substantial emissions reductions alongside economic growth, and find that the retreat constitutes a comprehensive ethical failure across all five dimensions. We introduce the concept of reactive economics, situated within established scholarship on carbon lock-in and fiscal path dependency, to characterise the structural pattern of subsidising harm-generating activities while dismantling instruments designed to address their consequences. The paper concludes with institutional recommendations, including an independent carbon price board mechanism, for reintegrating carbon pricing within values-explicit governance frameworks.