Taxpayer: Paid Dividend for Polluters
by Obama’s pending Cap and Trade legislation makes taxpayers pay for big and little polluters. Even though the legislation is supposed to charge heavy polluters for their pollution, it sets standards that allow polluters whose accident of plant location,or design, or even function, set their pollution below the “standard.” They can then sell or trade their “credits” to heavier polluters. Should there be any allowable pollution standard? Shouldn’t we target zero pollution as our immediate goal for future generations?
Let’s just say that a carbon pollution tax-it really should be an energy tax- is a good idea. But trading the right to pollute is not.
An energy tax taxes fuel usage of all types, and has real economic muscle, as so aptly demonstrated in the gas price run-up, of encouraging conservation, so much so that miles driven dropped by a significant amount. Zero pollution should be the goal, the gold standard. Trading a company’s limited pollution rights (as against a allowable higher standard that still allows pollution) perhaps rewards an accident of plant design, or location, and unnecessarily compensates polluters. Since plants built ten or twenty years ago or more could not have anticipated a Cap and Trade Bill, rewarding them for having less pollution than a politically contrived “standard” seems unfair.
Better that the free marketplace should manage this process through marketplace-induced incentives that taxes on gasoline, diesel, coal, natural gas and other fuels would encourage, the amount of tax on each determined by their pollution contribution. Talk about incentives!
More importantly, America has already demonstrated it’s ability to conserve with the gas price run up.
That is the direction that conservation-through-taxation would allow a free market to encourage.
Pollutant taxes, with no pollution trade incentives, would rapidly push polluters to mitigation technologies, plant replacements and alternative energy sourcing. If taxation is the only way to encourage the types on incentives and conservation that America needs, then let’s do it the right way.
I could support a Universal Pollution Tax that subjects all polluters to a Zero Standard, with the tax based on anything emitted over that Zero Standard. By the way, the same should apply to waste water, a mostly under-managed, even unacknowledged and mostly untaxed cause of pollution, causing national treasure water bodies like the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay to become water “deserts” in terms of sustaining sea life, and providing food resources and recreation.
Adding tax-based incentives to consumers, credits for pollution-free vehicles, for energy conservation through household energy independence, and other market-based incentives would help as well.
In the end, the logical choice for home, industrial and commercial power is Nuclear power, which in considering overall cost and pollution reduction offers the absolute best approach.
Let this also be a vote for “energy self-sufficiency legislation” a combination of tax incentives and technology research to make every home an independent “energy island” able to generate its own energy and water treatment through a combination of solar power and other technologies. Studies indicate that achieving individual energy independence for a household family of four could be achieved for less than $50,000 per household in retrofitting existing households, and less than $40,000 for new construction.
Like John Kennedy’s Space Program commitment, a ten or twenty-year commitment to balancing domestic fuel and other energy production with usage offers undeniable rewards in terms of both homeland security and related energy security. Foreign policy constraints imposed by energy concerns could be eliminated, offering new opportunities for the U.S. to reinforce it’s role as “trusted broker,” able to be fair and helpful in affecting outcomes resulting from world resource, territorial, population, and energy strife.
U.S. energy independence is worthwhile, attainable and a goal truly reflective of the American spirit.
Liked it
