Yes, today is Tax Day – or, more accurately, the deadline Uncle Sam has given us to finish handing-over his take of our hard-earned paychecks.
Today in particular it baffles me how some folks support imposing a new carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions when there’s a proven, market-based alternative available in cap & trade. Here’s a recent argument for the tax that I saw posted over at carbontax.org.
I don’t get it.
Regular readers here at Terra Rossa know I’m not a fan of a carbon tax. But I’m amazed that many supporters of a tax continue to talk about cap & trade like it’s an unproven theory or some kind of experiment that’s going to be thrust on our economy. Not so. As part of the Clean Air Act of 1990 a Democrat-controlled Congress and President George H. W. Bush adopted a market-based cap & trade program to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. It was a huge success, cutting SO2 emissions in half at a small fraction of the cost many opponents had warned would be the case.
Personally, I’d like to see history repeat itself, this time with President George W. Bush and a Democrat-controlled Congress adopting a cap & trade system to reduce carbon emissions. I don’t minimize the number the issues to be worked on in order to apply cap & trade successfully to pervasive carbon dioxide – but neither do I minimize America’s know-how and ingenuity.
No, the idea of a carbon tax scares me. I’ll take a market-based solution to climate change over a tax any time – especially one that’s proven to work.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Cap and Trade, Climate Change . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Tucker –
What part of “revenue-neutral carbon tax” don’t you understand? After all, the post you cite at our Carbon Tax Center Web site, by James Handley, used that phrase three times. And “revenue-neutral” is all over our site.
Or do you oppose even a revenue-neutral carbon tax? Why on Earth would you (or anyone), considering the close-to-zero administrative cost of a carbon tax and its enormous “co-benefits” (less traffic, less coal mining, less air pollution, less oil dependence)?
As for the success of cap-and-trade in curbing sulfur emissions, we acknowledge that on our Web site. We also take pains to explain why, crucially, carbon ain’t sulfur.
Could we respectfully ask you to do a bit more reading before firing, next time? Thanks.