Carbon Tax Quotes

the added expense of carbon capture and storage for all the new coal plants expected to be built in all of the world’s developing nations could be paid for through a one percent tax on the electricity bills of consumers in developed nations.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is what she announced, but not as far as those in the Opposition and hysterical commentariat were concerned.

In 2018, a paper by David Keith demonstrated a method for removing carbon at a cost perhaps as low as $ 94 per ton—which would make the cost of neutralizing our 32 gigatons of annual global emissions about $ 3 trillion. If that sounds intimidating, keep in mind, estimates for the total global fossil fuel subsidies paid out each year run as high as $ 5 trillion. In 2017, the same year the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the country also approved a $ 2.3 trillion tax cut—primarily for the country’s richest, who demanded relief.

Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory’s owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo’s annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? “It’s not a biggie.

Governments can tax carbon emissions, add the cost of externalities to the price of oil and gas, adopt stronger environmental regulations, cut subsidies to polluting industries, and incentivize the switch to renewable energy.

The post-2020 fiscal reckoning does not require higher payroll taxes or lower retirement benefits, as new sources of fiscal revenue are available from drug legalization, increased tax progressivity, tax reform that eliminates most tax deductions, and a carbon tax that provides incentives to reduce emissions.

We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their private jets, but none must depart from faith (in carbon dioxide) as set out in scripture (the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It is the duty of all to condemn heretics (the ‘deniers’), venerate saints (Al Gore), heed the prophets (of the IPCC). If we do not, then surely Judgement Day will find us out (with irreversible tipping points), when we will feel the fires of hell (future heatwaves) and experience divine wrath (worsening storms). Fortunately, God has sent us a sign of the sacrifice we must make – I have sometimes been struck by the way a wind farm looks like Golgotha.

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

In the United States, the Supreme Court blocked several attempts to levy a federal income tax in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then blocked minimum wage legislation in the 1930s, while finding that slavery and, later, racial discrimination were perfectly compatible with basic constitutional rights for nearly two centuries. More recently, the French Constitutional Court has apparently come up with a theory of what maximum income tax rate is compatible with the Constitution: after a period of high-level legal deliberation known only to itself, the Court hesitated between 65 and 67 percent and wondered whether or not it should include the carbon tax.

Environmental pollution is a regressive phenomenon, since the rich can find ways of insulating themselves from bad air, dirty water, loss of green spaces and so on. Moreover, much pollution results from production and activities that benefit the more affluent – air transport, car ownership, air conditioning, consumer goods of all kinds, to take some obvious examples. A basic income could be construed, in part, as partial compensation for pollution costs imposed on us, as a matter of social justice. Conversely, a basic income could be seen as compensation for those adversely affected by environmental protection measures. A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Across the world, in rich countries and in poor, governments have long used subsidies as a way of reducing poverty, by keeping down the price of fuel. This has encouraged more consumption, and more wasteful use, of fossil fuels. Moreover, fuel subsidies are regressive, since the rich consume more and thus gain more from the subsidies. But governments have been reluctant to reduce or eliminate the subsidies for fear of alienating voters. Indeed, a number of countries that have tried to reduce fuel subsidies have backed down in the face of angry popular demonstrations.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is exactly what she announced in February, when she laid out a path to an emissions trading scheme via a fixed carbon price. It was Abbott who labelled it a ‘tax’, and it stuck.

The good news is that advances in batteries, fuel cells, lightweight cars, and charging networks are making electric vehicles look more promising than ever before. To accelerate the economies of scale necessary for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, the government currently subsidizes the production and consumption of such cars. But in the absence of major technological improvements, these policies have proved insufficient. If policymakers took the politically unpopular step of taxing people for the carbon their cars emit, electric vehicles would capture a larger market share.

The fact that Costa Rica comes top of the HPI is both surprising and interesting. The data tells us just how well they are doing. Average life expectancy is 78.5 years; this is higher than the US, where it is only 77.9 years. Its ecological footprint is only 2.3 gHa, less than half that of the UK and a quarter that of the US, and only just over its global fair share which would be 2.1gHa. Meanwhile, largely unnoticed, Costa Ricans actually have the highest life satisfaction score globally, according to the 2008 Gallup World Poll, at 8.5 out of 10.0. What are they doing right in Costa Rica? Why are they so satisfied with life? A full answer is worth a book of its own, but here some clues: – They have one of the most developed welfare systems outside of Scandinavia, with clean water and adult literacy almost universal. – The army was abolished in 1949 and the monies freed up are spent on social programs. – There is a strong “core economy” of social networks of family, friends, and neighborhoods made possible by a sensible work/life balance and equal treatment of women. – It is a beautiful country with rich, protected, natural capital. There is clearly much we can learn from Costa Rica, and that is before we consider its environmental credentials: 99% of electricity is from renewable resources (mainly hydro); there is a carbon tax on emissions; and deforestation has been dramatically reversed in the last 20 years.

roads and consume more carbon than urbanites (though perhaps not as much as distant commuters forced out by green belts). But this damage can be alleviated by a carbon tax, by toll roads and by charging for parking. Many cities in the emerging world have followed the barmy American practice of requiring property developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces for every building—something that makes commuting by car much more attractive than it would be otherwise. Scrapping them would give public transport a chance. The second is that it is foolish to try to stop the spread of suburbs. Green belts, the most effective method for doing this, push up property prices and encourage long-distance commuting. The cost of housing in London, already astronomical, went up by 19% in the

The labor arbitrage view of global trade, a model that goes back to the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, assumes that manufacturing will always flow to low-cost countries. But the new automation view suggests that the advantages of cheap labor are shrinking while other factors—closeness to the ultimate consumer, transportation costs (including possible carbon taxes), flexibility, quality, and reliability—are rising.

We must rein in temperature increases and help ensure that the most vulnerable can adapt. But today’s popular climate change policies of rolling out solar panels and wind turbines have insidious effects: they push up energy costs, hurt the poor, cut emissions ineffectively, and put us on an unsustainable pathway where taxpayers are eventually likely to revolt. Instead, we need to invest in innovation, smart carbon taxes, R&D into geoengineering, and adaptation...Making the world richer is also important...The richer people are, the more resilient they will be in the face of global warming.

A carbon tax forces you to take into account the climate disbenefits that your purchase is responsible for, so you can weigh these against the benefit… “It doesn’t just show consumers which products are carbon intensive and should be used more sparingly, but it helps energy producers move toward lower carbon dioxide emissions (perhaps through more reliance on solar and wind energy), and it encourages innovators to come up with new, lower-carbon processes and products.

mitigate the scale of change and avert its most harmful effects through aggressive and intelligent policies. It will not be cheap. To address it seriously we would need to start by enacting a carbon tax,

Pulling off this high-speed pollution phaseout, the report establishes, is not possible with singular technocratic approaches like carbon taxes, though those tools must play a part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move ourselves around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report’s summary states in its first sentence, is “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.

How do we arrive at a regime that is more sustainable? How do we avoid protectionism that will impoverish us all, hurting the poorest most? The United States needs to balance its budgets. China needs to open its markets. Everybody needs to emit less. And the lever to do all those things is a carbon tax that will make all fossil fuels—and therefore also all plastics—significantly more expensive than they are today.

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other

The upshot is the following: Perhaps 4 percent of extra GDP could be collected as of 2015 mainly by taxing the rich (2 percent), tightening corporate taxation (1 percent), strengthening tax enforcement (0.5 to 1 percent), taxing financial transactions, and taxing carbon emissions (0.5 percent). Introducing a VAT would raise even more revenues and could be phased in over several years. The point is that there are lots of options, and most of them could be concentrated near the top of the income distribution, where they belong. How

A “tax or emission trading scheme on livestock,” they argued, “could be an economically sound policy that would modify consumer prices and affect consumption patterns.” In the end, as climate impacts increase, the web of costs associated with cultivating plants and animals for food grows ever more complex—

So what does the Green New Deal mean? It’s not entirely clear, which is what makes it a good slogan: it could mean a number of good things. But the main thrust, as I understand it, is that we should make a big move to tackle climate change, and that this move should accentuate the positive, not the negative. In particular, it should emphasize investments and subsidies, not carbon taxes.

Count your carbon before they tax.

senator decided that he didn’t want to be the bad guy in the story. He spent Saturday huddling with West, sketching out a fresh offer for a climate bill, assembling a compromise he deemed worthy. When West passed along the document to Petrella and Deese, he told them that some fine-tuning might be required, but he thought it was a fair deal that Schumer and the White House could accept. As Petrella scanned the offer, he braced himself for the worst. But as he read, he absorbed the reality that Manchin had confounded his expectations. The plan was actually ambitious, not that far from the substance of their negotiations. Manchin had his demands, to be sure. They had covered most of this ground before. He wanted approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport natural gas from wells in north-central West Virginia, turning his state into a major player in that energy market. He asked for the Democratic leadership’s support for a separate bill reforming the process for permitting new energy infrastructure so that it could be built without having to surmount so many bureaucratic impediments. And he needed hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for deficit reduction, to assuage his centrist conscience. But that was just horse trading. The only thing that truly mattered was his proposing more than $300 billion in tax credits that would incentivize the nation to rapidly embrace clean energy. If Congress passed his proposal, carbon emissions would fall by 40 percent of the 2005 levels by 2030. Petrella, who felt at once elated and frustrated by Manchin’s wild swings, told West, “Lance, I’ve been sticking my neck out, defending you guys, saying that you were going to fucking do something here, for a year. I’m willing to do it one more time, but it’s got to be before the August recess, and this has got to be it. This is the deal. We’re locking arms.” West told Petrella that the document in his hands was the “flight plan.” They were going to finally land the plane. —

So if you combined this thing with carbon taxes, you would get taxed if you burn carbon, but paid if you sequester carbon.

When a federal court upholds a law that literally makes it a crime to give a child a cup of water in the desert; when Immigrants and Customs Enforcement abducts a child at an airport in order to force the (undocumented) parents to turn themselves in; when Border Patrol shoots people at the Mexican border with tear gas; that's the reactionary response to a warming world. It is a much simpler and more satisfying response than regulating energy companies or taxing carbon. It only has two problems. It is evil, and it will result in, if nothing else, the end of this country. People who want to live in such a world are already too querulous to make a society, even with each other, even if they get everything they want. Picture them trying to manage a baking earth, an evaporating Lake Superior riddled with Asian carp, a countryside full of feral bacteria and reeking of CAFOs that produce less food every year. It won't work. A fully achieved Fortress America would just be the Donner Party a day or two before the cannibalism starts.

Funding could be raised through a low carbon tax—one consistent with the provisions of the iron law. A public commitment to energy innovation might be realized by recognizing the world’s need for vastly more energy and the rights of billions of people to energy access commensurate with the richest around the world. An appeal to opportunity and growth will always find a stronger political constituency than demands for higher costs and limits.

Tax and dividend is progressive. A person with several large cars and a large house will have a tax greatly exceeding the dividend. A family reducing its carbon footprint to less than average will make money...A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective.

If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.

The government made little attempt to explain the link between the increased cost of living from carbon pricing and the reductions in income tax and increases in social security payments. One view among political strategists for the government saw more political advantage in taking credit for the income tax and social security changes and saying as little as possible about carbon pricing. That did not help the political standing of the government's policy on climate change.

In the 1990 election campaign both Labour and National parties adopted ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The country at that point was near carbon-neutral, with sources of emissions balanced by forestry which s3equestered the carbon. However, in the coming decade emissions would skyrocket as New Zealanders drove more; trucks replaced rail and shipping for freight; coal and gas were increasingly burnt for electricity; vast swathes of the country’s farms and wetlands were converted to dairy farming; and coal was used to convert that milk to powder for export. The National government spent the 1990s anguishing over what tool to use to reduce emissions and ended up doing nothing. Labour came in in 1999, signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and announced a carbon tax, but set it so far in the future that coalition politics eventually killed it. Meanwhile, every year, NZ’s net emissions increased from cars, cows and coal. Labour took climate pollution out of the RMA, relying on voluntary commitments and technological wishes… By 2008 NZ’s emissions were 25% higher than they had been in 1990. Pg339

A 2010 Greenpeace analysis of spending on climate-denial groups between 2005 and 2008 found that Koch Industries and its affiliates spent $24.9 million to support such groups, almost triple Exxon’s $8.9 million in spending.V And Koch was more uncompromising than Exxon, whose lobbyists made it known that Exxon might support some sort of carbon emissions plan, such as a carbon tax.