carbon tax – Climate Depot

A fool’s errand: Al Gore’s $15 trillion carbon tax to ‘re-engineer humanity’ to save us from global warming

by Fred Palmer | May 9, 2017, 5:00 AM

Al Gore wants to reverse modernity and save the world from itself through an elimination of its fossil-fuel-based energy system. During the final week of April, his newly created Energy Transitions Commission released a document setting forth a fool’s-errand pathway to “decarbonize” the world’s energy system.

If this sounds familiar, it is. Gore’s plan features a new, sophisticated, and expensive public-relations campaign, but it’s all based on his views on carbon dioxide first broached in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, which he reissued in 2000 for his failed presidential campaign. The subsequent efforts made by Gore during the past 25 years have transformed little from their genesis, and he remains as tragically wrong today as he was when he first surfaced as an opponent of everything linked to carbon-dioxide.

A fool’s errand: Al Gore’s $15 trillion carbon tax

Washington Examiner

If you scroll through the verbiage surrounding the document, you will find the core policy recommendation is a massive, punishing carbon tax. Gore would start the tax at $50 per ton, which would increase to $100 per ton over time, essentially destroying the market for continued robust development of the world’s fossil-fuel base. Our economic growth and personal well-being depends on robust fossil-fuel use, so Gore’s plan would destroy these as well.

But, don’t worry! The all-in estimated cost to re-engineer humanity is only a mere $15 trillion—enough money to give every man, woman, and child in the United States more than $46,000.

Al Gore has been demonizing fossil fuels and attempting to marginalize all those involved in the traditional energy sector since 1988, the year the climate-change movement was rolled out in Washington, D.C., which happened to correspond with a nationwide heatwave and with Yellowstone in flames. Ever since, Gore’s pathway to political power and personal riches has been a successful one, to be sure, but his multi-trillion-dollar effort today is his most sophisticated effort to date. Unfortunately for him, it will also fail, because what he’s selling in his “new” proposal is bad for the people being asked to embrace it.…

Trump Considers Climate Skeptic, Carbon Tax Opponent For A WH Enviro Post

could appease Trump’s climate skeptic supporters

Source: Trump Considers Climate Skeptic, Carbon Tax Opponent For A WH Enviro Post…

Report: Trump Considering Left-Wing Carbon Tax To Fight Global Warming

According to The Washington Post , the Trump administration is “exploring the cre

Source: Report: Trump Considering Left-Wing Carbon Tax To Fight Global Warming…

Trump Is ‘Not Considering’ A Carbon Tax — But some want you to think he is

The White House is not considering a tax on carbon dioxide to fight global warming, according to an administration official.

“The Trump Administration is not considering a carbon tax,” said White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters, according to Axios, shortly after Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave an ambiguous answer on the subject when asked by reporters at Tuesday’s press briefing.

“Part of the [National Economic Council’s] responsibility in coordinating economic policy for the President is to listen to a range of viewpoints on various issues,” the official told Axios.

Spicer dodged a similar question in February after reports came out that White House officials met with former Republican officials who pitched replacing federal regulations with a revenue-neutral carbon tax.…

NYT, WaPo, Time, CNN Praise ‘Republican’ Calls for Carbon Tax

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Point: Trump’s Too Smart to Fall for Harmful GOP Establishment Carbon Tax Plan

Posted to Energy February 15, 2017 by H. Sterling Burnett

Editor’s Note: For an alternative viewpoint, please see:Counterpoint: Carbon Dividends — the Gipper Would be Proud

Some old-guard Republicans are floating the idea of a national tax on carbon-dioxide emissions. The newly minted Climate Leadership Council (CLC), composed of aged establishment Republicans who’ve seen their stature diminish with the rise of the tea-party movement and election of Donald Trump as president, tried to appear relevant by pitching the worn-out idea of a carbon tax-and-rebate scheme in a meeting with President Trump on February 8.

In exchange for the tax, CLC proposes eliminating nearly all of former President Barack Obama’s climate policies. It’s almost certainly true regulatory greenhouse gas restrictions imposed by the Obama administration distort energy markets more than a straight carbon tax would, but why replace a bad set of policies with a slightly less bad tax? This is not one of those repeal and replace moments. Let’s just get rid of the regulations, full stop, no replacement!

The only reason to discourage the use of fossil fuels is to prevent supposedly dangerous climate change. Yet the best evidence — as opposed to dubious computer model predictions — suggests humans aren’t causing the climate to change in ways that even remotely threaten human health or environmental integrity.

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‘DEAD ON ARRIVAL’: CARBON TAX PUSH FROM FORMER GOP OFFICIALS FACES STRONG OPPOSITION

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GOP’ers who once smeared Trump pitch carbon tax to White House

By Thomas Richard

Members of the conservative Climate Leadership Council, half of whom publicly denounced candidate #Donald Trump during the election, visited the White House yesterday to extol the benefits of a #carbon tax. In their view, such a tax would mark the first step toward fighting global warming while potentially gaining new constituents for the party.

The CLC, run by eight old-school Republicans and business leaders, wants to impose a $40 tariff on each ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted through mechanical or industrial policies. In exchange, the administration could cancel some of the most expensive EPA rules.

With friends like these…

And even though the Council’s membership is comprised of GOP loyalists, many made disparaging comments about Trump during the campaign. Henry M. Paulson, Jr., a CLC member and a GOP Treasury Dept. secretary, said he had voted for Hillary Clinton. Three others made critical comments that might also overshadow their case for a new carbon tax.

While most politicians understand that things said during a heated campaign are just rhetoric, it’s a little different when your own party members are voting for or supporting the other candidate. But Trump is not like most politicians and may see things differently. During the campaign, George Shultz, who served as Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, told a crowd at the Hoover Institute “God help us” over the notion of a Trump presidency:

Another member on the CLC is N. Gregory Mankiw, who served as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005 under President George W. Bush. Mankiw told CNBC’s John Harwood he could never support or vote for Trump. He also said a Trump administration would be worse than an Obama/Clinton presidency.

The Council tried to convince the administration that a carbon tax could start immediately, …

Don’t Let ‘Party Elders’ Fool You on Carbon Tax

By Michael Needham
February 09, 2017

If the 2016 election proved anything, it’s that our nation’s best and brightest are far less capable of predicting and managing complex change than they like to tell themselves.

It’s a lesson that has been a long time coming. From a financial crisis that wrecked all the best models designed by the smartest minds on Wall Street to the collapse of a health care overhaul designed by the pointiest heads in Washington, events have long been conspiring to warn policymakers against their own hubris.

One would hope, then, that Washington might have made a collective New Year’s resolution against grand plans built on overconfident assumptions. Yet, some within the Republican establishment – the very people who proved least capable last year of responding to unpredictable events – seem inclined instead to double down on the worst instincts of those in power, conspiring in back rooms to impose yet another wrongheaded technocratic policy: a new carbon tax.

Conservatives have long opposed a carbon tax for the same reason we oppose tax increases generally: They grow government and throw a wet blanket on the economy. A carbon tax would maximize both negative effects. After an election year dominated by talk of the decline of American industry, it would strike a major blow to already weak manufacturing sector and would continue the Obama Administration’s eight-year-long assault on coal country – an assault President Trump commendably promised he would end.

Moreover, compared to the income tax with which Americans are most familiar, it would be barely visible and therefore be easy to raise. According to press reports, the carbon tax currently being contemplated would already raise $3 trillion in ten years, and its advocates insist that even this tax would be only a starting point. Say goodbye to fiscal restraint when this kind of cash comes pouring into Washington.

The tax’s proponents claim it will be revenue neutral, that the money generated would be returned directly to American taxpayers in the form of a rebate. Not only would this be next-to-impossible to implement as intended, it would almost certainly be subverted to other political considerations.

As David Kreutzer and Nicolas Loris of The Heritage Foundation point out, such grand plans ignore obvious political economy problems: “Just the sniff of a new revenue stream to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually has the special interests

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DELINGPOLE: Reagan Would Have Hated this Stupid ‘Conservative’ Carbon Tax Idea

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 …

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