Tag Archives: energy

A Carbon Tax Proposal

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No less a pair of lights than George Shultz and James Baker III have one regarding atmospheric carbon emissions.  They’re prefacing their case on their then-boss, President Ronald Reagan’s successful negotiation of the Montreal Protocol to rein in the failures of atmospheric CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer.  Not that the two have anything to do with each other, but it makes for good obfuscation.

Shultz and Baker have four “pillars” to their proposal:

First, creating a gradually increasing carbon tax. Second, returning the tax proceeds to the American people in the form of dividends. Third, establishing border carbon adjustments that protect American competitiveness and encourage other countries to follow suit. And fourth, rolling back government regulations once such a system is in place.

Their first pillar echoes ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) promise to let electricity generators use all the coal they wanted; Obama’s policies just would put them out of business.  No carbon emissions. Period.  Never mind that there’s very little need to reduce carbon emissions.  Atmospheric CO2 used to generate acid rain, but that pollution is long since reduced to the point of elimination.  Beyond that, the EPA’s pseudo-science “finding” notwithstanding, atmospheric CO2 is plant food, not a pollutant.  We eliminate that plant food at risk.

Return the tax proceeds to us as dividends?  That’s just wealth redistribution by government fiat.  Haven’t we had enough of Progressive redistribution failure already?  Not to mention the cynically internally illogical mechanism for the redistribution.

A $40-per-ton carbon tax would provide a family of four with roughly $2,000 in carbon dividends in the first year, an amount that could grow over time as the carbon tax rate increased.

How could the dividend grow—isn’t the tax supposed to reduce emissions significantly?

Border carbon adjustments?  Pit importers against exporters again.  That’s the outcome of the existing border adjustment tax being proposed in the House today.

Roll back the regulations once “such a system is in place?”  Really?  Can Shultz or Baker name two programs that have been rolled back once they’ve been enacted?  They’re not that naïve.

This is just more Progressive foolishness, now being spouted by two fine gentlemen who’re past their age of usefulness.

Of Course It Is

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Now that the Obama administration’s end is near, and a new guy is being put forward to run Obama’s EPA, that agency is changing its mind about the impact of fracking.

Fracking can affect drinking water supplies in certain circumstances….

The report, written by Environmental Protection Agency scientists, includes findings that are more open-ended than those in a draft version last year, when the agency said fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, isn’t having “widespread, systematic impacts on drinking water.”

When pressed on the “updated” report, which contradicts that earlier draft, EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Thomas Burke conceded the draft’s prior conclusion that only a small number of cases of contamination had been found—even though that was left out of this later iteration of the report.

While the number of identified cases of drinking water contamination is small, the scientific evidence is insufficient to support estimates of the frequency of contamination[.]

Even the identified instances of contamination—surface spills of fracking fluids or poorly done cement casing of a wells—have little to do with fracking, but are failures to execute.

Of course this drives the conclusion that when you can’t find the needle in the haystack, you don’t have enough evidence to say that there aren’t many needles in the haystack.  That’s some science the EPA has there.

Keep in mind, too, that this is same agency whose pseudo-science concluded that plant food—atmospheric CO2—is a pollutant.

Apparently rigorous thinking was outside of these guys’ school safe spaces.

The Entire Island

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Repair crews worked through the night trying to restore electricity to Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million people early Thursday after a fire at a power plant blacked out the entire U.S. territory.

Officials said they hoped to restore service by morning….

It turns out that they didn’t make by the morning, and the outage extended into a second day—lengthened not just by the severity of the problem, not unique in itself to Puerto Rico, but also by Puerto Rico’s lack of money with which to fund repairs or even parts and equipment to replace the damaged/failed parts and equipment.

I have to wonder about similar vulnerabilities, similar single points of failure, extant on our separated States and other separated territories and within CONUS.  I have to wonder about these vulnerabilities not only in our power distribution grids, but in our communications grids, and cascading from those, in our financial networks and our government effectivity networks.

As Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said,

The system is not designed to withstand a failure of this magnitude.

Neither are any of our systems.  Nor are they designed to any large degree to minimize, if not eliminate, single points of failure.