<it's coming, we can't affect it very much even by spending a ton of money, maybe we can slow it down for a few years at best. Since we can't prevent it, it would be more cost-effective to spend the money on adaption than prevention. >
Nadine, since taxation is an omnipresent burden on all sorts of things which are not only harmless, but contribute great benefit to people, and the taxes take a lot of bureaucracy to collect, it would be better to shift taxation burdens to areas where there are problems.
Carbon taxes are easily managed because oil travels in big tanks, big pipelines, comes mostly from overseas [if you are American] and there is a LOT of oil and everyone uses it, directly or indirectly so it's an equitable tax.
Therefore, don't ban carbon as a fuel, or require vast dramas to sequester it. Simply tax it. That will raise the price, and at the margin, people will opt out of the tax by moving to non-carbon means of achieving the same thing, such as insulation, smaller cars, better engines, photovoltaics, moving house, using cyberspace and so on.
Taxing oil imports would also shift economic activity to local producers of alternative technologies, which would prolong low cost oil reserve lifetimes, cut funding to Saudi Arabian terrorists, reduced dependence on wacko foreigners [depending on wacko Yanks like Enron and Governor Gray is much smarter], cut CO2 production [which might be worth doing] and generally make life wonderful.
To keep the Texans happy, not to mention the North Slope producers such as BP, carbon taxes could be applied only to imports.
If that breaks the WTO rules, change the WTO rules. Mike Moore, a good Kiwi joker who is currently running the show, is very approachable and would see the merit of taxation on carbon instead of environmentally-friendly CDMA phones.
The USA is running out of indigenous oil anyway, so it's not as though there'd be simply a shift to high-cost local production. GeorgeW would have to introduce a simultaneous big tax cut to get Americans to like the idea of a new tax on carbon.
That would cause a big boost to the USA economy too - by shifting production to USA-based industry, so the tax cuts could be twice what the import carbon tax would cost consumers.
Saudi Arabia, Saddam and Iran would have to cut their prices to sell the stuff. That would cut their income, which would be no bad thing - they don't seem to spend it very wisely anyway, buying flight training, box-cutters, and fomenting insurrection by Palestinians. They need to be Colinized. That would cut terrorism too.
Mqurice |
