“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. …
“A carbon tax is not simple either, especially when you start talking about how the revenue will be distributed. … Yes, there would be a food fight over the revenue….”
– Antonia Herzog, Natural Resources Defense Council
“I wish I could tell you that Republican offices have approached us and said, ‘Thank you for doing this, we are ready to talk about it’…. [F]rankly Senators Schatz and Whitehouse are two of the more liberal members of the Senate.”
“There is also concern from the left that those conversations [with Republicans] could lead to eradication of EPA authority or at least a moratorium on EPA authority, which leaves some folks nervous….”
– Michael Obetter, Office of Sen. Brian Schatz
“I find these meetings extremely productive and helpful. They have influenced my thinking in how best to go about what I want to accomplish in the House and Senate with the GOP.…