“A carbon tax would have a net negative effect on consumption, investment and jobs, resulting in lower federal revenues from taxes on capital and labor. Any revenue raised by a carbon tax would be far outweighed by the negative impacts to the overall economy.”
Pricing carbon dioxide (CO2) to wring competitive advantage and to appease environmental pressure groups once drew notable business support from the big players, such as Ken Lay’s Enron and John Browne’s BP. But not from Lee Raymond’s Exxon Mobil, although Rex Tillerson’s Exxon Mobil supports a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade.
But presumably, as a key member of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), Exxon Mobil is opposed to a carbon tax in the current political environment. Another big energy and political player, Dow Chemical, which dropped out of NAM on the gas export issue, is against a carbon tax judging from its Australian experience.…
Continue ReadingThe Sierra Club, as yesterday’s post described, has ditched its previous support for natural gas, the cleanest burning fossil fuel. And so goes the modern, Washington, DC-based environmental pressure group movement, rejecting not only oil, gas, and coal but also nuclear, hydro, and most biofuels. Translated into today’s energy usage, some 98 percent is bad and 2 percent good. [1]
Turning an industrial economy over to the two most costly, unreliable (intermittent) energy resources–solar and wind–is a lights out, engine stall strategy for a modern industrial economy.
Where does such anti-industrial, anti-human, coercionist thinking come from? The answer is the deep ecology movement.
“Deep Ecology”
As mentioned yesterday, a radical wing of the modern environmental movement rejects a human-centered anthropocentric view of the world in favor of a nature-first ecocentric view.…
Continue Reading[Ed. note: Tomorrow’s post, “‘Deep Ecology’ versus Energy,” will examine radical environmental metaphysics in more detail.]
An influential branch of the modern environmental movement rejects a human-centered anthropocentric view of the world in favor of a nature-first ecocentric view.
Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in a 1973 essay differentiated between shallow ecology, a concern with pollution and resource depletion in the developed world, and deep ecology where “the equal right to live and blossom” ends what is seen as a master-slave relationship between human and nonhuman (lower animal and plant) life. [1]
The platform of the Deep Ecology Foundation, formulated by Arne Naess and George Sessions, declares that “present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening” and calls for
… Continue Readingchanges in policies affect[ing] basic economic, technological structures.