“The ‘vast majority’ of CO2 pipelines carry carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, according to US Department of Energy…. But this free-market niche is a now being joined [via the Carbon Capture Coalition] by a wholly new application for CO2 that is all about government mandates and subsidies.”
“As Wendall Phillips warned in 1852, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few’.”
Government goes to those who show up. This aphorism explains the growth of government: those particularly advantaged by special government favor organize and lobby while the rest of us tend to our private business.
Such cronyism marks real-world government versus the romantic view wherein impartial legislators above the special-interest fray wisely block the entreaties of those who would injure the common interest of taxpayers and consumers.…
“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”
– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.
Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:
Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.
“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.…
“The last thing American families need is for our nation’s lawmakers to put our economy in reverse by enacting a national carbon tax.”
“A ‘carbon dividend’ is simply wealth redistribution by another name. And history is littered with the economic casualties wrought by heavy-handed government interference in the marketplace.”
Yesterday, a group of free-market, classical-liberal/libertarian, conservative groups sent a letter to The Honorable Paul Ryan (Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives) and The Honorable Kevin McCarthy (Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives) asking for consideration on H.Con.Res. 119, “express[ing] the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States.”
The letter follows (in red), with inserted comments by me.
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A carbon tax is a policy with one definable goal: to raise the cost of traditional, reliable, affordable sources of energy. …