by Thomas Catenacci
The White House said Americans should pay higher taxes to ensure a rapid green transition away from fossil fuels in a report on President Joe Biden’s economic record.
The federal government can encourage such a shift through carbon taxes or a cap and trade system forcing an emissions limit on companies, said the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) report released last week. The White House added that consumers would continue purchasing “artificially inexpensive, carbon-intensive goods” without proper government policies in place.
“Such carbon prices could be implemented directly via carbon taxes, indirectly through a cap on emissions and tradable permits, or through other similar policy tools,” the CEA said in the report. “Government revenues from the carbon price can be used to compensate consumers for increases in energy prices or to invest in other societal priorities.”
“Carbon prices are just one of many policy measures needed to cost-effectively accelerate the energy transition,” the CEA continued.
Under a carbon tax, the government would require energy providers to pay a price for every ton of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The costs would then get passed along to consumers who would be forced to pay more for energy.
A “cap and trade” system creates a limit for how much greenhouse gas companies can emit. If a company goes over the limit, they would be fined or they could purchase credits from a company that was below the limit.
“Complementary policies can make it cheaper or easier to conserve energy or to shift away from carbon-intensive products,” the White House economic report added.
Just 44% of Americans support a carbon tax while 29% oppose the policy, a 2019 Associated Press survey showed. But 80% of respondents said they backed tougher restrictions on power plant emissions and 73% supported a tax on corporate emissions, according to a June 2020 poll by Pew Research.
However, voters in the State of Washington — a majority-liberal state — rejected a carbon tax in 2016 and 2018 referenda. Nearly 60% of Washington voters rejected the measure in 2016 while more than 56% voted against it two years later.
“For the person smack in the middle of the political spectrum, all they were seeing is this ‘$200-and-something-more cost of energy for me, I don’t like this, that’s it. I’m done, I’m not voting for this,’” Ioana Marinescu, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, said in 2020 regarding the Washington votes.
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Thomas Catenacci is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Joe Biden’s Stingray” by Adam Schultz-Biden for President CC2.0.
Sorry: The “Green Transition” is an organized, gang-up, pile-on, flim-flam fraud scam for the greatest theft of all time, this one in broad daylight, to steal $93 trillion from US taxpayers. The scam also gets support from deluded, anxiety-ridden, ignorant, convenient idiot, weird-o, quasi-religious cult creep whack-os.
In fact there is no, none, nichts, nil, nada, zip, zilch, zero credible evidence that human sources of CO2 have had, are having, or will have a significant effect on the temperature of earth.
The climate alarmist ‘climate scientists’ did their studies and calculations and made their predictions: The predictions of significant temperature increases, e.g., their “hockey stick”, came and went years ago without any credible evidence of significant increases. Since good science has predictive value, ‘climate science’ is bad science and should be junked.
This scam has us with $4+ a gallon gasoline instead of $2- a gallon, massive inflation of the whole US economy, a shot in the gut of our energy supplies, damage to our national security, big trouble in our foreign policies, and waste on subsidies and the costs of new regulations. The Democrat supporters get money from subsidies, and the Democrat politicians get power. The ordinary US citizens pay the money and give up the power. Bummer. Major parts of the US MSM (mainstream media) get revenue from eyeballs by pushing a ‘climate crisis’ and acting as a Bernays-Goebbels style propaganda arm for the scam. The scam is dysfunctional, destructive, disastrous, and dangerous. Trump did not fall for the scam.
Tough to have anything more clear: We need to stop shooting ourselves in the gut; we need to junk the scam.
Way past time for another tea party