Pat Michaels writes at Forbes:
Washington’s version political suicide is the brainchild of former Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC), who lost his primary by a 70-29 margin when he got global warming religion. He now heads the “Energy and Enterprise Initiative” at R Street Partners, a relatively new Washington think tank which split off from Chicago’s libertarian/conservative Heartland Institute over their aggressive stance on climate change.
Inglis’ theory—you can’t make this kind of stuff up—is that his tax is going to be magically adopted by Congress in some type of grand deal during President Obama’s last year. Ask yourself: when was the last time the opposition party made big deals with a lame duck Administration?…
One can use the EPA’s own model (curiously, acronymed MAGICC) to assess the effects on global temperature of emissions reductions that would be caused by a carbon tax. Assuming outrageously high taxes that would reduce them by 83% (giving Americans the per-capita emissions of 1867), the amount of warming that would be prevented is too small to measure on the 50-year time scale. Anything less does even less.