carbon tax

A Nation columnist goes contrarian; GM goes the other way

Did lefty pundit Alexander Cockburn and corporate behemoth General Motors secretly agree to swap climate positions?

It looks that way. GM, swallowing hard, recently joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the elite enviro-business coalition pushing cap-and-trade -- a so-called "market-based system" for controlling carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the famously acidic Cockburn lacerated global warming orthodoxy in his column in the Nation magazine, deriding it as a "fearmongers' catechism [of] crackpot theories" ginned up by "grant-guzzling climate careerists" and opportunistic politicians looking to ride the greenhouse "threatosphere" all the way to the White House. (Whew!)

But there's less here than meets the eye. For as the inconvenient details of cap-and-trade schemes start to surface, USCAP is looking less and less like a CO2 control lobby and more like a corporate club seeking to cash in on the rising clamor against free carbon spewing. And Cockburn, it turns out, has been raining on the climate crisis parade for years.

A new study with intriguing conclusions

This is interesting. One of the big dings on a carbon tax has been that it’s regressive — it will hurt the poor (who pay a higher percentage of their income for energy) more than the rich. But according to a new study, it ain’t so: But the new study, based on data from Indonesia, […]

Reviews are good

New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson gave a big speech today in which he introduced what sounds like an extremely ambitious climate and energy plan. The speech isn’t online yet, and the plan isn’t on his site yet, so all I have to go on is reactions from people who have seen […]

And if not, why not?

A journalist of some renown called me last week to ask a question: would it be possible to do both a cap-and-trade program and a carbon tax? Al Gore famously urged that approach, but this journo had heard from other (reliable) sources that it’s not possible. My instinctive answer was yeah, sure, there’s no reason […]

Could the unthinkable become thinked?

Over on MyDD, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) discusses the carbon tax bill he recently introduced. My legislation, the Save Our Climate Act (H.R. 2069), would tax coal, petroleum and natural gas at a rate of $10 per ton of carbon content. Applied when these fossil fuels are initially removed from the ground, the tax would […]

Discuss amongst yourselves

This is heartening: the activist netroots are starting to get serious about figuring out global warming policy. Welcome to the fun, y’all! Stoller comes to a familiar conclusion: carbon tax is preferable to cap and trade. I think he’s a little hard on the latter, but the basic position is sound — and all but […]

If you can really call Chris Dodd a ‘contender’

Finally, a candidate for president has come out in support of a carbon tax! OK, it was Chris Dodd, but still. Dodd’s big energy speech this morning was mostly the usual stuff about tax credits and subsidies, but here’s the section that produced the headline: The truth is, we can make all the clean energy […]

Boxer is a fighter

Senator Boxer vows to take the global warming fight to the administration, rules out carbon tax in favor of cap and trade.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the details.

Because shopping shouldn’t require matrix algebra

A lot of people ask why carbon permits or taxes should be levied as far upstream as possible. Why tax or auction permits for pumping or importing oil, rather than burning it?

One obvious answer is: red tape. Regardless of where a tax is levied, you will pay. But if it is collected at the wellhead, you don't have to have a separate line on every gas receipt under the sales tax. Your local supermarket does not have to buy a major upgrade to it's software, slowing the line you are in as their system crashes, and the checkers switch to hand calculators.