With little fanfare, President Obama is sneaking carbon emission trading in the back door: he’s planning to addict the US to revenues generated by selling carbon permits to fund his expanded healthcare, environmental, and educational agendas.
According to the New York Times:
His administration will attempt to close the large fiscal gap even while starting a major health-care initiative meant to substantially extend coverage; to do so, it foresees increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and using revenues from a new program: selling carbon credits to manufacturers as part of a cap-and-trade plan meant to slow climate change.
Now we have a time-line. Elsewhere in the Times, it is reported that:
…… the 2012 projections include revenues from a source that does not yet exist: a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system.
An endangered species – a market-friendly idea – was spotted recently in an interview with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: The Obama appointee is considering replacing gasoline taxes with a tax on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) as a means to fund highway and transportation infrastructure maintenance. He asserts that this kind of “outside the box” thinking will typify the Obama administration’s initiatives (Something to be devoutly hoped for).
If they actually replace the gas tax with a VMT tax, rather than piling on, it would be a great improvement in terms of infrastructure maintenance, as a person’s impact on highway infrastructure is proportional to miles-driven, rather than gasoline consumed. A gas-guzzler driving 1,000 miles does the same damage to the highway as a fuel-sipper that drives 1,000 miles, unless they are radically different in weight class.…
While I’m quoted in the Houston Chronicle’s CERAweek column on an optimistic note, developments with the “stimulus” package make me less optimistic by the day. What I told Tom Fowler of the Chronicle, when discussing the anti-oil mentality of Representative Ed Markey, now chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, was…