Donald Trump should pursue a regressive, counterproductive, pointless tax policy to deal with a non-existent problem because it’s “what the Gipper would have wanted.”
Yeah, right.
What the late Ronald Reagan is actually doing right now, I strongly suspect, is reaching for the celestial sickbag over this absurd proposal – endorsed by, amongst others, his former Secretary of State George Shultz – that President Trump should bring in a “carbon tax” in order to “combat climate change.”
Obviously the New York Times is very excited about this proposal because it thinks it’s a sign that conservatives are seeing the light:
A group of Republican elder statesmen is calling for a tax on carbon emissions to fight climate change.
The group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former secretary of the Treasury, says that taxing carbon pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is “a conservative climate solution” based on free-market principles.
Mr. Baker is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, the senior adviser to the president, and Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, as well as Ivanka Trump.
Nope. What this story actually does is remind us of one of the main reasons why Donald Trump – and not any of his more Establishment rivals – ended up winning the GOP nomination: because the GOP Establishment had drifted so far away from the conservative principles they were supposed to uphold that they might just as well have been Democrats.
According to Baker: “I’m not at all sure the Gipper wouldn’t have been very happy with this.”
Oh, that delicate use of litotes to make his elegant point! It’s the kind of refined circumlocution you can imagine going down an absolute storm at Skull and Bones reunion gatherings or 12-course Bilderberg dinners or anywhere else where you might find the right sort of people in the Republican party.
Actually though what it really is – and this is typical of that weasellish political breed – is a clever way of saying something completely untrue without quite lying.
Ronald Reagan would, in all likelihood, have rejected a carbon tax for at least two reasons.
First, a tax on “carbon” is a tax on growth because carbon-dioxide is a natural by-product of …
Bill Nye wants to ‘save the world’ by explaining to your kids how science works, despite not being an actual scientist.
Bill Nye Saves the World. JoBlo TV Show Trailers (YouTube-Screencap)
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Netflix is launching a new show confidently titled “#bill nye Saves the World” where Nye will explain complicated topics like global warming to kids as he understands it. The show wants to illustrate how #Climate Change impacts everything from politics to pop culture, but from his “special blend of lab procedure” and quirky guests.
He also wants to refute what he considers are non-scientific claims by industry leaders, politicians, and religious leaders. By doing that, he’ll be “saving the world.” There’s just one problem: Nye is a not a scientist and his track record is dreadful.
Since ending his first show in the early 2000s, Nye has been on a quest to convince as many people as he can that climate change is the world’s greatest threat. But schoolchildren aren’t interested in demagoguery, but rather “how and why” things tick. And parents may be wondering if a climate activist should be spreading his gospel to their children. He also brings with him over a decade of controversial assertions that may prove daunting to overcome.
In a heavily publicized experiment, Nye tried to demonstrate how carbon dioxide (CO2) warmed up the atmosphere. He put a thermometer in a sealed container filled with excess amounts of CO2. He then used a heat lamp to warm up the container and watched as the temperature rose. That, he said, was proof that CO2 is overheating the planet. But what Nye proved wasn’t CO2’s response to radiation like the sun, but rather the “convective” properties of any gas.
Genuine scientists who replicated his experiment used Argon as an experimental control gas (a staple in #Science) and just like the CO2, it heated up as well. The problem was that Argon has no infrared properties; Nye’s experiment only proved the “processes related to convective heat transfer,” which play no role in global warming. That didn’t stop Al Gore from incorporating the
Former White House advisers, cabinet secretaries pressing tax
Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn among scheduled attendees
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A group of prominent Republicans and business leaders backing a tax on carbon dioxide were taking their case Wednesday to top White House aides, including chief economic adviser Gary Cohn.
The group, including former Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and James Baker, is pressing President Donald Trump to tax carbon dioxide in exchange for abolishing a slew of environmental regulations. They unveiled their plan with a press conference in Washington and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
“We know we have an uphill slog to get Republicans interested in this,” Baker said before heading to the White House. But “a conservative, free-market approach is a very Republican way of approaching the problem.”
Other possible attendees at the meeting include the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who weighed climate change policy during the campaign, and Vice President Mike Pence.
The Republican and business leaders, calling themselves the Climate Leadership Council, lend their stature to an approach for addressing climate change that mirrors an idea already advanced by Exxon Mobil Corp. Supporters say the tax is a conservative solution to climate change that replaces a regulatory regime with a free-market approach for addressing the greenhouse gas emissions.
Wal-Mart Founder
Paulson, who served as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, previously has advocated a carbon tax through his eponymous think tank, the Paulson Institute. Baker, who served as secretary of state and Treasury secretary under two Republican administrations, as well as former Secretary of State George Shultz, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Rob Walton and Sequoia Capital Operations LLC partner Thomas Stephenson, among others. Economic advisers to former presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan also are involved in the effort.
“Climate change poses an unacceptable risk to our climate and to our economy,” Paulson said in a statement. “Putting a price on carbon is by far the most efficient and effective way to restrict emissions.”
Baker himself conceded he remains “somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change” but the
A few decades back, an upstanding member of the global warming alarmist community said that if the public was going to take the threat of man-caused climate change seriously, the alarmists were going to have to exaggerate the evidence.
It was in 1989 that Stephen Schneider wrote in Discover magazine that in order “to capture the public’s imagination . . . we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
Let’s not forget that the late climatologist was first a believer in global cooling in the 1970s. He was worried that a new ice age was coming.
Of course the alarmist community has followed Schneider’s script. It’s spent much of the last three decades trying to spook the public into a panic.
One example of this agenda to drive fright into our brains was the ClimateGate scandal at Britain’s University of East Anglia. A series of email threads between climate scientists showed that they were torturing the temperature data to produce evidence of warming that wasn’t occurring.
Who can forget their conspiracy to “hide the decline”?
Don’t think this is an isolated incident. News out of the United Kingdom over the weekend tells us that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data.”
“A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the United Nations climate conference in Paris in 2015,” the Daily Mail reports.
“The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 — revealed by U.N. scientists in 2013 — never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected.”
The Daily Mail identifies the whistleblower as “John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation.” His strong objections to the publication “of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact.’ ”
Bates blames Thomas Karl, the paper’s lead author, whom he said insisted “on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation . . . in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming
Climate change could lead to “killer cornflakes” with the cereal carrying the most potent liver toxin ever recorded, an environmental health conference has been told.
The effects of the toxins, known as mycotoxins, have been known since the Middle Ages, when rye bread contaminated with ergot fungus was a staple part of the European diet, environmental health researcher Lisa Bricknell from Central Queensland University, said.
Ms Bricknell said there had been outbreaks of high levels of aflatoxins in Australian crops in recent years and global warming was providing a new threat to food safety, with temperatures expected to rise in inland areas of the eastern states while rainfall was tipped to fall.
The chief executive of a prominent science group said they currently have no intention of retracting a study at the center of a controversy involving accusations of scientific malpractice by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists.
Rush Holt, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told lawmakers Tuesday he saw no reason to retract a 2015 NOAA study claiming to have eliminated the global warming “pause” from the temperature record.
Dr. John Bates, the former principal scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., went public with complaints that NOAA scientists put a ‘thumb on the scale’ to get results that showed more global warming since 1998.
Holt said he sees nothing wrong with the study, and that Bates’ accusations amounted to an “internal” NOAA dispute over archiving practices. NOAA’s 2015 study was published in the journal Science, which is published by AAAS.
“This is not the making of a big scandal,” said Holt, a former Democratic congressman. “This is the internal dispute between two factions of an agency.”
“There’s nothing to suggest there are problems with that work,” Holt said.
Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith disagreed.
“It may be a lot more serious than you think,” said Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Smith launched an investigation into Karl’s 2015 study, eventually hearing from other NOAA employees the study may have been rushed to influence policymakers meeting at a United Nations summit later that year.
Smith subpoenaed NOAA for emails related to the study, but the agency fought back. NOAA eventually handed over emails, but many were redacted. Smith has used Bates’ public complaints as a launch pad for further inquiry.…
A group of Republican senior statesmen is pushing for a carbon tax to combat the effects of climate change and hoping to sell the plan to the White House.
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker is leading the effort, which also includes former Secretary of State George Shultz. In an opinion piece published Tuesday night in the Wall Street Journal, they argued that “there is mounting evidence of problems with the atmosphere that are growing too compelling to ignore.”The group will meet Wednesday with White House officials, including Vice PresidentMike Pence, senior advisorJared Kushner and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council. IvankaTrump, the president’s daughter and Kushner’s wife, is also expected to attend, according to a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to discuss the meeting publicly.
Carbon taxes are designed to raise the cost of fossil fuels to bring down consumption. Baker and Shultz detailed in the opinion piece their plan for a gradually increasing carbon tax, with dividends being returned to consumers, as well as border adjustments for the carbon content of exports and imports and the rollback of regulations.…
