OPINION:
Every problem in Washington finally finds a solution, and it’s usually called a tax. A group of policy mavens, eager to do something for everybody, proposes to tax carbon, the substance found in all forms of fossil fuels. It’s the fourth-most abundant element in the universe. The idea is that if there’s a levy on the carbon content of oil, coal and natural gas, consumers will use less of it. Presto! No more human-caused global warming. But it still smells like a tax.
The Climate Leadership Council includes distinguished men who served several presidents — George Shultz, secretary of State for Ronald Reagan; James Baker III, the secretary of State for George Bush the elder; Secretary of State Hank Paulson for George the Younger, and Rob Walton, formerly the CEO of Wal-Mart — and they have pitched the scheme to the Trump administration.
They want Mr. Trump to adopt the tax and spike the reams of climate regulations that President Obama bequeathed, including the Clean Power Plan. Says Mr. Baker: “If we can get an insurance policy that is a conservative approach, based on the free market, that limits government, doesn’t expand government and that is competitive internationally, that’s a win-win, and we ought to take a look at it.”
But the Donald was elected to cut taxes, not impose new ones, and so far has, with respect, declined.
The council contends the scheme would have numerous benefits that include providing a cost-effective method of reducing carbon emissions and restraining the regulatory overreach of the Environmental Protection Agency. It would, theoretically, put money in the pockets of low- and middle-income families on a means-tested basis in the form of quarterly dividends. The rich would end up paying their fair share and everyone else’s — a thoroughly “progressive” concept.
A new tax is usually born the size of an ant and grows to the size of a wooly mammoth. The government men in the green eyeshades reckon that a ton of carbon dioxide has a “social cost” of about $40, a measure of its impact on human health and the environment. This would find a resting place in the government’s coffers.
Experience shows that the very sight of loot dazzles politicians, and triggers an appetite for more. Once upon a time, the top federal income tax rate was 2 percent. Now it’s 39.5 percent.
An even more fundamental question is whether the taxpayer should be penalized for using fossil fuels in the first place. A widely respected government scientist has blown the whistle on a landmark National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report that was used to sell the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. John Bates, a former NOAA scientist, says the “pause-buster” report left out crucial temperature readings that undercut the warmist belief that increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, are actually heating the planet.
The Climate Leadership Council is promoting a solution to a problem for which the jury has still not decided is a problem. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito observed not long ago that “a pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant . All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.”
Before carbon is tarred as the bane of human existence, Americans should consider that the U.S. continent sits above an ocean of molten carbon the size of Mexico, which the Earth occasionally burps it up as volcanic eruptions. Maybe the revenue schemers can figure out how to tax that.
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