I ought to declare an interest: I don't live in California.
People should lead by example. That is the best way to get people to follow you. I have long said that somewhere like California should go full steam ahead with all carbon reduction strategies to show the world what can be achieved.
Then all fossil-fuel-based items should be removed from the shops. All plastic should be removed, for instance. Materials that take a lot of energy to create should be removed as well. That would affect anything with alumin(i)um in it and many chemicals.
If it turns out that all Californians have a wonderful lifestyle and their carbon emissions approach zero and the climate stops changing in California then we would all jump on the bandwagon. You could not keep us off it.
If, on the other hand, people and major companies relocate to somewhere cheaper, no-one is allowed to extract fossil fuels, there are not enough people to run the necessary services, maintain the solar and wind farms and the tax rates are the highest in the world then I suspect we would not want to follow.
Why don't we just try it out and see what happens? Such things used to be called experiments. Nowadays, someone decides on a course of action then tells us how it will work out. The rest of their career is spent trying to prove that they were right all along in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile we all suffer.
As long as all carbon sources are covered and the carbon price is representative of the real damage from carbon then yes, I agree. It seems CA's carbon taxes will be lower than carbon damages (which is the point of cap & trade: it's supposed to ensure lowest carbon prices for a given target). Forecasts are around an average $13/tonne of CO2, which is 11 cents on the gallon.
I prefer British Columbia's carbon tax, where carbon tax cash is used to cut taxes on income and industry. But in the absence of that, acting on climate change now is much cheaper than waiting or than doing nothing. Even if you're willing to have a worse economy in order to ensure that fossil fuel companies keep bigger profits, I would say it's a moral imperative if you don't think that we should be allowed to make our own children & grandchildren, and those in poorer countries, suffer a lot.
That is part of the greenies answer to solving the environmental problem. Taxes and tyranny!
Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official: "We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy...Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization...One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore."
Their raising taxes has never historically solved any of the environmental problems. But they keep coming back for more. I lived in California for ten years and I can say without reserve, on the whole they are next to New York in the overall gross stupidity category. Look at who they elect. Moonbeam who screwed up California so bad in the 70s that it never did recover. Miss Muffler, Nancy Pelosi, "We have to pass the law before we can see what's in it." Ha! Ha! That is California intelligence.
California is trying to confiscate money wherever they can find it. They thought they were going to make all this money on tobacco taxes but a funny thing happened. Tobacco use decreased and the idiots and Sacramento had already spent the money. Well it isn't that funny since they were real dollars. The only thing stupider that a US carbon tax would be a single state carbon tax. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. These are the kinds of solutions we get from alarmists.
Dook, it was your boy, Jimmy Carter that came up with the bright idea of getting us off exports by taxing domestic production. Conservative economists never recommended taxes on ME oil. Dook lives in his little cartoon world with evil oil executives and he mocks conspiracies. I know he is trying to be funny but wow is that bar set low.
Every election, we have bonds going to the children and the poor. If that money really went to them, we would have the richest children and poor in the world. Instead it goes to crap like the High Speed rail line from LA to Frisco to insure the union campaign donations keep coming in.
Nothing helps like a good regressive tax???
Got to love the liberal view of defending the poor.
And Dook, You might want to note that they are leaving Cali for Texas in droves.
Just another way to get more of peoples money to throw down the government rat hole.
The idea of tax shifting to address economic externalities often require the taxation on a product or service be matched by credits on another so that the net tax revenue is zero so I would be asking how the credit would be applied and on what. To be honest, reducing natural gas use would not reduce the greenhouse gases problem as due to the difficulty in storing natural gas ( liquefaction and cryogenic storage ), unused natural gas is typically burned in flares.
The only thing that will do is give the greedy Goverment more money to spend . More people will move out and the poor people will hate it .
This may seem quite a steep move for the citizens but if this will be the way to impose discipline on fuel usage, then I totally get the point.
Not at all ,this is just one more way for our government to steel our hard earned income . and then they will give subsidies' to others for gas .
On Jan 1, 2015, California will increase gas taxes an additional 16 cents to 76 cents in the effort to tax carbon and end so-called "global warming". This will raise the price of gas to close to $5/gal. Do you agree with California's decision to raise the gas tax, and how much more would you be willing to pay for a gallon of gas to save the planet?
http://www.nacsonline.com/News/Daily/Pages/ND0623142.aspx
Burning gas has a price on others. Why should you get to make my air harder to breathe for free?
Conservative economists have recommended increasing taxes on the Mideast's leading export, and main revenue source for Islamic terrorism, for decades. Even back when climate science was all but unknown to most people, even most executives of oil companies whose deceptions are all most climate science deniers have ever read on the subject. $5 a gallon is cheaper than in most industrialized countries. Maybe that's why millions are fleeing the Stalinist tyrannies of Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Luxembourg and pouring into Texas as fast as they can? No informed and honest person has ever claimed that taxing gasoline will "end" global warming or "save" the planet, however.
Edit: JimZ, resident expert in abiotic oil geology, and stone thrower in glass houses, hates climate science because liberal environmentalists like it. But being too lazy to learn much of the science he goes off kilter when his anti-science crusade here strays too far from "I don't understand it, therefore nobody else does either." Here he claims "conservative economists never recommended taxes on ME oil." Well maybe not directly, in recent years. But Ronald Reagan viewed the idea favorably http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-3749827.... and plenty of conservative economists have supported taxing gasoline (actually the question of the page), in part BECAUSE it would discourage imports of oil. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.ch/2006/10/pi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Mankiw
Edit @ Rasin: If you look up the numbers 1% of Californians were born in Texas, and 2.6% of Texans in California, but California's population is larger than Texas's. There has been a small net cumulative flow from California to Texas, several times smaller than the excess of foreign immigrants to California versus Texas. There is some interstate competition here, but gas taxes don't appear to play a major role:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ca...
yes.
