In spite of evidence from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado that “Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007,” it is politically and financially convenient for carbon capture, carbon sequestration, and carbon tax proponents to continue the push to fundamentally alter the U.S. economy with the worn out lie, “man has caused global warming.”
“And the planet is certainly warming. Humans releasing trapping gases into the atmosphere are almost certainly responsible for much, if not all, of that warming; the particular patterns of warming, comparison to the historical record, and the basic precepts of physics all indicate this.” (Op-ed, Washington Post, July 18, 2012)
How can one argue with such non-scientific liberal thinking, backed up by “basic precepts of physics?” Science is not “almost certainly,” science has to be factual and exact. If you search, “basic precepts of physics,” you realize that the above statement is shameless and worthless propaganda.
Refreshing to read something about the anti-science, anti-energy agenda of the current administration and the “green” movement in general.
Can you say, “rent seeking”?
I am “almost certain” that she is almost maybe correct. However, since there has been no global warming for 15 years, I now am sure she is with a doubt absolutely incorrect. Maybe if she wishes upon a star, her global warming dream will come true.
A revenue neutral carbon or oil tax that cut payroll taxes would benefit the economy. To the average person, a big oil tax would be a push when combined with a decrease in payroll taxes.
However, large oil taxes would decrease oil consumption and price even as employment increased from the payroll tax reduction. Alternative energy would look more feasible while dependence on, or interest in, the Middle East would decrease and would could drop our military budget. We could then tell the Middle East to go pound sand, while their rapid population increase made them more dependent on our food.
We should support a revenue neutral oil tax for national security and long term strategic national interest reasons having nothing to do with CO2.
Sure and I admire your faith. A “revenue neutral tax”.
If you were pushing to reduce the costs and increase the access for domestic resources then I’d say you were on to something but let politicians anywhere near a tax and it’s going to cost you. I’d go so far as to say the most dangerous place in the world is between a politician and a bucket of money.
And “alternative energy”? We have carbon literally to burn for centuries, why should we play with pretend sources?
The payroll tax is the only funding of Social Security. Cutting it, as has been done the last couple of years, is INSANITY.
Deweaver, please look up the broken window fallacy. Your claim of economic benefit is no different than the claim that a broken window helps the economy.
Furthermore, “alternative energy” projects aren’t. Neither solar nor wind power are economically feasible due to their poor output (wind power actually can be net-negative energy-wise in situations due to the huge cycling issue), and no accounting tricks are going to change that. You merely make the bad idea look better by dumbing down the good idea.
Finally, if we want to eliminate dependence on the mid-East and OPEC, then we would do best to facilitate oil production at home, increase our strength and importation with our neighbors (Canada and Mexico will always be our allies due to the terror of having us as enemies if nothing else). The actions of the greens has been to solidly undermine these options despite the fact that America holds 24% of the world’s proven hydrocarbons, and both Canada and Mexico have a substantial share as well.
If SS and Medicare were paid out of an oil tax, everyone would know that the retail price of oil would continue to increase (OPEC price + Tax). The obvious connection would impact long term decisions in the direction of less use.
There are millions of individual decisions which impact overall oil usage and Middle East oil domination. We need to keep in mind at this time of high unemployment that many adjustments to higher oil taxes would provide employment for a lot of people. In addition, higher oil taxes would open up innovation space for everything from i-Phone based super ride-sharing / hitchhiking / instant taxi / going my way type apps which would fill auto seats and handle all the time/distance/billing operations, as well as checking for dangerous people. Apps such as these could cut passenger mile fuel consumption (and subsequent taxes) in half. In addition the desire to minimize oil tax would further the evolution of driverless (Google cars) cars which can follow each other at 2″ at 70mph, again resulting in 40% better seat mile fuel consumption than mass transit systems while eliminating traffic congestion by increasing lane capacity. These innovations could kill off the California bullet train long before it is paid off.
Though opportunities for employment in these tax-minimization efforts would increase, it would not be at the expense of employment in the oil industry. The highly automated oil industry would keep all its jobs, because the number of employees is almost independent of production levels in automated industry.
Beware of CO2 taxes!
Switzerland has enacted an idiotic (and punitive) Co2 tax, and the result will be an additional 2000 to over 5000 Swiss Francs (roughly at parity with the US dollar) on all new automobiles sold starting July 1, 2012.
The tax is calculated on the empty weight of the vehicule and the Co2 output per kilometer, giving an advantage over heavier vehicules. The tax penalties stack up to achieve 142.50 Swiss Francs per excessive gram (of Co2) emmited per kilometer; with the first 4 excessive grams free of tax,
An example; A relatively heavy BMW X5 XDrive 40D emmiting 198g/km would have a Co2 tax of 2915.-Swiss Francs. A much lighter Audi TT RS Coupe, emmiting 197g/km, would be taxed 5509.-Swiss Francs. This punishing tax will be added to the sticker price in an already sluggish market.
Car dealers, who must pass on this tax to the buyer, have somewhat softened the blow by averaging the tax across their inventory, but this only works effectively if they have over 50 cars on the lot. Large car dealerships are the exception here. More commonly, Switzerland has hundreds of small dealerships with rarely over 15-20 new cars on inventory, so these small dealerships will necessarily go out of business.
Junk science is alive and well in Bern and the economic consquences be damned.
I assume the effect will be that car dealerships will spring up around the border. I.e., the other side of the border.
No, actually many Swiss have already been purchasing their cars in the EU states to get better deals. Whether Germany for the Audi, VW or Mercedes or Italy for their brands (Alfa Romeo & Fiat) it has become advantages to do so for some time. This was not the case before the fairly recent bi-lateral trade accords with the EU. Before the accords a foreign purchased car was subjected to a high import tax so there was no real incentive to buy a car outside of Switzerland.
The Co2 tax applies to all new cars no matter where they are purchased. As long as the new car is to be registered in Switzerland it will be hit with this insane tax.
The Green party and the Socialist party have pretty much run the dialogue on global warming and Co2 for the last 20 years. It is taught in school from and early age. My nieces were all brainwashed with this one-sided nonsense and now my six year old daughter is getting her daily dose of indoctrination.
It, climate change, is consired as gospel and the few dissenting voices are considered nut cases to be ridiculed. All major news outlets sing from the same sheet music. At least in the States the jury is out and more and more people are distrusting the GW/Climate Change message. The Swiss have swallowed it up like gullible sheep and the goverment is only too happy to translate this mass idiocy into onerous new taxes to “save the planet”.
Do hard work and prosperity turn people into brainless dolts void of any common sense and begging for punishment? I sometimes wonder why the West is committing economic suicide.
Hmmm . . . might be fun to survey license plates in Switzerland to see how many foreign plates you see.
That is why a carbon tax must be simple and just a tax on carbon at the source as it comes out of the ground or imported and not have the government micromanage exceptions, rebates, minimums — they are what really make a mess of the system.
Goodness deweaver, governments already treat carbon as a cash cow and tax the whatsit out of it. It’s taxed at exploration through leases and claims, at extraction through royalties while refining, transport, distribution and use all attract government taxes too. And then companies are taxed on profits and shareholders on income.
I suggest we take taxes off carbon, not put more on.
It doesn’t work like that here Gamecock. Car registration is a closely controlled enterprise…if that’s a good choice of words. If you are a Swiss resident your car must have Swiss plates. There is a short grace period if you are, for example, a German who has taken a job in Switzerland, but eventually, if he is a legal resident with a work visa, he will have to put Swiss plates on the car and pay all the related fees that go with it.
Just as there are fifty states in the US with each its own DMV and license plate, there are 26 cantons each with its own DMV and LP. The canton of Geneva has plates coded with the abbreviation “GE”. The canton of Valais had “VS”. Fribourg is “FR”, and so on.
You cannot take take legal residency in any canton and cleverly drive around with your own car registered elsewhere. You cannot get Swiss car insurance on a foreign registered car, and insurance is obligatory here to the extent that if you allow your insurance policy to expire the police will come to your house and literally remove the license plates from your car. I can testify to that because it happened to me some 20 years ago.
There is, unfortunately, no clever method to avoid the Co2 tax here short of buying a 100% electric vehicule.
Americans always try.
http://www.aikenstandard.com/story/070812-aiken-county-sheriff-office-tag-enforcement-officer–4113613
Happens a lot with private airplanes, too. People register them in other jurisdictions, to minimize taxes.
It’s worse with boats. Even former presidential candidate Kerry got caught.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38378992/ns/politics/t/sen-kerry-docks-yacht-ri-saves-taxes/
dweaver, just curious, just how would the EPA, for example, determine how much “carbon” is in a barrel of crude oil? How could they possibly know to what end that barrel is to be used. Some barrels will no doubt be refined into fuel, but what type of fuel; lighter fluid, gasoline, JP4, A1, diesel, home heating oil. All these fuels are burned at different rates and temperatures and some are cleaner than others.
Also, would the EPA base their tax on the various qualities of the crude oil-and there are a hundred levels of quality, from the dirtiest high sulfur crude to sweet crude.
The same determination would have to be made for coal.
A Co2 tax at it’s base can be nothing more than junk science and that is why it’s the ideal tax-em-till-they-bleed wet dream for governments. It pretends to do something for the environment but does nothing but steal from hard working citizens and render their lives more miserable, expensive and oppresive than it already is.
It boggles my mind that so many people actually believe that human industrial activity effects the climate. Meanwhile, while we in the West run these idiotic experiments of taxation and regulation, countries like China, India and a score of smaller players are whipping our butts; and in a generation will have us on our knees both militarily and economically.
I bet you didn’t know that China finances its’ military buildup mainly with the money the US sends them yearly to service its debt. And all our brilliant Western leaders can think to do is cripple their own economies in order to appease a political base so egotistical as to believe they are somehow saving the earth.
I never thought I’d see the day the Chinese Communist party would eventually teach the so-called free West economic common sense. But that is exactly what they are doing.
Determining carbon content is trivial with a mass spectrometer. Assuming that all will be converted into CO2 will give a more accurate measure that any of our taxes based upon appraisal of “market value” such as real estate, art, etc. that no one complains about. The C/H ratios on crude oil is reasonably consistent. Gas liquids have a lower ratio than heavy crude but no where near the local variation in $/ft2 for real estate.
“no one complains about.”
You must be deaf.
Your zeal for a new tax is grossly misplaced.
Eric, please read 40 CFR 98 if you really want specifics. Please note, the federal determination of CO2 emissions is ludicrously more complex than necessary and actually leads to significant undermeasurement of CO2. Any junior engineer or chemist can easily determine the CO2 emissions of combusting a fuel.
The actual carbon content is trivial if you know the basis. The Carbon is converted to 90-99.99% CO2 with the remainder being unburnt hydrocarbon, Carbon monoxide, or semi-oxidized material. Assume 100% and you’re done.
For a revenue neutral tax shift, you don’t have to show that a proposed carbon tax is perfect, just, accurate or even logically consistent or will achieve an optimum economic efficiency with respect to externalities (which are hard to calculate). A revenue neutral Pigovian tax only has to be better than the tax being reduced. A payroll tax does more damage that even a lousy carbon or oil tax every would.