Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Nature advocates a magical carbon dioxide hoax tax that would simultaneously prevent bad weather, be revenue neutral, provide revenue to pay down the debt, provide a pile of cash that could be redistributed, and not cost anybody anything

America’s carbon compromise : Nature News & Comment
The numbers are not negligible. An analysis conducted in August by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge showed that a carbon tax of US$20 per tonne of carbon from fossil fuels, if instituted in 2013 and increased by 4% per year, would raise $1.5 trillion over the course of a decade. Averaged out, this amounts to $150 billion annually — a sizeable chunk of the trillion-dollar deficits that the US government has been running in recent years. Scholars at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington DC, advocate ramping federal investments in energy research up from $3.8 billion now to $30 billion annually, to drive down the cost of low-carbon energy (including cleaner-burning coal). It is an ambitious proposal, and would leave a pile of cash that could be redistributed elsewhere for beneficial use.
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Conservatives loathe taxes, and US politicians obsess over energy prices, but a revenue-neutral carbon tax would get around these problems....As US politicians contemplate diving into the fiscal abyss, they would be wise to consider a painless policy that benefits everyone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Magical thinking. Isn't it amazing that education does not impede the willingness of the ignorant hopeful to self-deceive?

Is this a modern, sophisticated situation of the child who denies he breaks the lamp you saw him break? A, "A bad boy doesn't embrace the need to raise taxes and turn the economy away from fossil fuel, regardless of the impact. I am not a bad boy. Therefore I support raising taxes and turning the economy away from fossil fuels regardless of the impact. Because I am a good boy."