“[M]any industry groups have maintained that putting carbon dioxide in the air would produce a general ‘greening’ of the planet. In fact, that’s the thesis of a famous 1992 video, “The Greening of Planet Earth,” which riled the environmental community more than just about anything else [because] … big-name scientists were willing to appear and argue that carbon dioxide will enhance global plant growth.”
– Patrick Michaels, Global Warming Produced a Greener, More Fruitful Planet, September 13, 2001.
Today, President Obama sounds the climate alarm and calls for more regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2). Throwing bad regulation after bad in the name of climate change is all about costs without commensurate benefits. Simple math shows that unilateral action by California or the U.S. or North American will not have a discernible influence on climate decades out.…
“The American people and the 133 cosponsors of this concurrent resolution understand that a carbon tax is not about protecting the environment, but rather it is a cynical attempt to raise revenue for Washington’s insatiable appetite for more and more spending.”
Federal carbon-dioxide cap-and-trade legislation was defeated in 2009 with no prospect of a retry. Now, the even less popular carbon tax is being floated by non-conservatives and wannabe-be conservatives as somehow “free market” and “efficient.” This very well financed desperado push needs a reality check in Congress.
Any new qualitative tax, and certainly one as huge and far reaching as this one, is an open sesame to bigger government and politicized energy. Some argue that there is a “free market” case for a carbon levy, but there is not a “limited government’ case.…
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”
– Wendell Phillips (1852)
Government wealth transfers from the many to the few is called the concentrated benefits, diffuse costs problem. Certain companies and projects get the loot–one hundred cents on the dollar–while the rest of us (taxpayers) pay an incalculable fraction per redistributionist dollar.
Democracy is perverted too because the majority would say “no” if directly asked but are far too busy tending to their own (nonpolitical) lives. Michael Giberson found this in a 1935 book explaining the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1932:
…Although . . . theoretically the interests supporting and opposed to legislation . . . are approximately equal, the pressures upon Congress are extremely unbalanced.