“Some might argue that some existing preferences increase energy production and thus, contribute to lower energy prices. Yet many of the preferences at issue have little or no impact on energy production; they simply represent wealth transfers.
Those preferences that do reduce energy production costs simply encourage market actors to produce costly, economically uncompetitive energy. Markets are not made more efficient by producing costly relative to less costly energy.”
Earlier this year, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute wrote a tax policy missive to the Energy Tax Reform Working Group of the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee, chaired by Kevin Brady (R-Texas), is one of eleven such working groups chaired by Dave Camp (R-MI) and Ranking Member Sandy Levin (D-MI).
Taylor and Van Doren espouse cleaning out the tax code to allow a more neutral tax structure to determine the production and consumption of competing energies.…
When asked if a carbon tax was preferable to EPA regulations on greenhouse gases, David Kreutzer, a research fellow with the Heritage Foundation who sat on yesterday’s panel, described the question as a trap.
…It’s like asking me what’s the most humane way to execute innocent people …. When conservatives talk about a carbon tax, the headline says, “Conservative supports carbon tax,” So I’m not going to be drawn into this fantasy world where we speculate on what might happen when we know it won’t, when it gives people ammo to misrepresent what I said.
So no, a carbon tax is not preferable to EPA regulations.
– Evan Lehmann, “Conservatives Attack Each Other Over Carbon Tax Plans,” ClimateWire, July 18, 2013.
“[Ken] Green delighted his mostly conservative audience by comparing a carbon tax to a vampire who must be staked, beheaded and sprinkled over water — ‘preferably holy water’.”
“When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about ‘extreme weather’.”
– Matt Ridley, “Nobody Even Calls the Weather Average,” July 9, 2013.
There is no link between global warming and Sharknado, tweats U.S. EPA. But this summer, global warming has been blamed for firefighter deaths, more thunderstorms, and poor lobster catches. The litany of abnormalities that is so big and broad that contradictions, not only prima facie absurdities, abound.…