Carbon taxes are really just another way for governments to take more money from citizens and private entities while doing nothing to reduce the government’s carbon footprint. Have you ever seen government cut back, especially since all their fossil fueled operations are paid for by forcibly taking money from citizens
Report says carbon taxes in B.C. and Alberta ‘failed’ in not lowering emissions
A new report says carbon taxes in B.C. and Alberta have done nothing to lower emissions in the provinces.
The study, by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI), compared B.C.’s carbon tax and Alberta’s tax on large emitters to the European emissions trading scheme and Quebec’s cap-and-trade agreement with California.
“Overall, the emissions trading system (ETS) policy was found to be more effective at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than the Carbon Tax policy or a Hybrid policy,†said the study.
“B.C. carbon tax policy boosted economic activity but had no effect on emissions. Since the objective of regulatory policy is to reduce emissions, our results suggest that the carbon tax policy in British Columbia failed to achieve its goal.
“In fact, oil prices have been found to have a bigger effect on emissions in B.C. than carbon tax.â€
“Alberta SGER policy did not reduce GHG emissions as well.â€
You know why these straight taxes make no difference? Because they just pass on the costs to the consumer. All that happens is consumers pay more and government gets more, but, consider, not just from charging the carbon tax: they get more tax revenue from sales tax due to the higher price of the products and services. A double win for government.
But, hey, if citizens want to vote for this idiocy, let them feel the monetary pain.
If liberals really understood economics, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.
Energy usage, while it has some elasticity, is less elastic than many other things. To purchase most things, from the inelastic, like food, to the very, luxury items, most people require a car to get to the marketplace in which they buy consumer goods. You have to go to the grocery store; you don’t have to go to Macy’s. But to even consider buying stuff from Macy’s, you still have to get in your car to get there. The higher carbon taxes simply mean that you might have to buy something less expensive when you get there . . . or that you might have to bypass Macy’s and go to WalMart.
Come wintertime, something pretty serious in British Columbia and Alberta, Canucks will have to heat their homes, and with the northwesterlies blowing in on them, they aren’t going to skimp on the heat . . . and the fossil fuel burning that is required.
On Sunday, I noticed that one of our parishioners had a new Chevy
DoltBolt. Since there are no electric car charging stations in our small, rural county, I knew that he had to have a charging station at home. Good for him!Thing is, for all of the emissions from his vehicle that he’s saving, our sparktricity comes from a coal burning power plant.
I was nice enough not to point that out.
Curiously, both TEACH and the cited article failed to link to the CERI report.
Why?
https://ceri.ca/assets/files/Study_189_Executive_Summary.pdf
Both carbon tax and emissions trade systems have a great capacity to reduce GHG emissions; however, a level at which they are utilized is not adequate for significant change towards low carbon economies;
Strengthening existing and adding new carbon policies and actions, especially those that can deal with carbon leakage, is needed;
Current carbon prices in many jurisdictions remain insufficient to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement, even with extended carbon pricing policies in place to align with the specific GHG reduction targets;
Stronger complementary policies and actions are needed to achieve the total reductions in GHG emissions in a case of the BC carbon tax;
Lessons from ETS systems, especially California’s cap-and-trade system, has revealed that the economy-wide approach can be more efficient than managing specific sectors differently;
Linkage of a cap-and-trade system with those in other jurisdictions (such as California’s cap-andtrade system linked with Quebec) could potentially reduce abatement costs, price volatility, and market power.
It is what it is.
Yet termite CO2 emissions still persist and remain unabated.
Lolgfy
Termites (actually their enteric bacteria) convert wood, not fossil fuels, to CO2.
Humans convert fossil fuels to CO2.
If you need an explanation why these facts are important to global warming, just ask.
Wood is still a fuel, last I looked.
And humans do not convert fossil fuels to CO2. Internal combustion does. CO2 is used up in photosynthesis.
If you need an explanation why these facts are important to debunking global warming, just ask.
And Rimjob thinks CO2 emissions aren’t CO2 emissions unless they’re a byproduct of “fossil” fuels.
Silly little Rimjob.
Lolgf
Rodney doesn’t understand the Earth’s carbon cycle, that the relatively rapid turnover of cellulose CO2 HASN’T increased CO2 in a million years, but a mere century of converting fossil fuels to CO2 has. Rodney relies on bon mots rather than knowledge, much like Stumpy McTrump.
Rodney should explain that since termites are NOT a new occurrence on Earth why has CO2 only increased in the past century or so, coincident with our burning of coal, gas and oil.
More like it isn’t what it is.
If you want to shut down an economy, heavy taxes are the way to go and Jeffery forgets that we, along with most of the rest of the world (if they’re honest) do not abide by the Paris Accords.
This is what the oh-so-well-meaning Mr Dowd and the rest of the warmunists forget . . . or choose to ignore. 62.7% of our total electric generation comes from fossil fuels: 38.4% from natural gas, 23.5% from coal, and 1.3% from other fossil fuel sources. Add to that 19.7% from nuclear, which isn’t a greenhouse gas source, but which so many on the left hate. Total renewables make up 17.5%.
It will be the nuclear plants, the ones which don’t generate CO2, which have to be replaced first, as all but a couple are over fifty years old. A couple of new nuclear plants were licensed during the Obysmal Administration, but the left will fight tooth-and-nail against more nuclear power plants.
Of course, the real advantage of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants is that they generate electricity constantly. Solar plants can only generate power during daylight hours, and even then their capacity becomes significantly reduced on cloudy, rainy or snowy days. During the winter, with shorter daylight hours and colder temperatures, their productive capacity declines.
Wind power? The wind does not always blow at speeds strong enough to push the turbines.
To build these monstrosities requires gobs of money, a lot of land, and time. If they were profitable and efficient, private investors would already be building them in far greater numbers. As it is, it will require the government to get things going . . . and that means higher taxes, along with higher sparktricity bills once the plants are in operation.
All of this means that the public will have far less money to spend as they wish. When the government takes more, the people have less. Mr Dowd and the left can blame it all on the Evil Donald Trumpâ„¢, but that sure doesn’t explain why all of the other countries which signed the Paris Accords are falling short; does President Trump control their governments and economies?
What the warmunists want will make people poorer. They can say that we’ll all be better off in eighty years, but the economic shutdown has exposed a brutal fact: people are more concerned about having a roof over their heads and food on the table today than they are on what the climate will be long after they are stone-cold graveyard dead.
The well-meaning Mr. Dana has never explained how transitioning from CO2 emitting energy sources to non-emitting energy sources will cripple the economy. It’s another myth that Cons believe without evidence.
Connies are justified in accusing anti-nukers of slowing nuclear development. The claims that nuclear facilities were dangerous, expensive and generated wastes were largely unfounded except for 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl (~ $250 billion cleanup) and Fukushima (~ $200 billion cleanup). Note too that no nuclear plant has enough insurance (how much would a $250 billion insurance policy cost!?!) to pay damages, which is why governments, i.e., taxpayers, are on the hook for it. It’s unlikely that taxpayers have a profit-sharing plan with the investors in the nuclear plants! Classic crony capitalism, similar to too big to fail banks. Investment is less risky when the feds have your back!
Unsurprisingly, plant construction slowed after each of the nuclear catastrophes.
A real connie tyrant could slash safety regulations, waste disposal regs and cap or even eliminate damages, and have taxpayers pay for any clean up.
There are the conversion costs, of course, but the real issue is internal combustion is the only cheap efficient energy source there is.
The “renewable” sources don’t provide enough bang for the buck, they can’t power a city.
Fission can do that, but it still has risks. Fusion may be the answer, but we’re still waiting.
So all of Jeffery’s pie in the sky is just that. Too bad it’s all based on fake data.
Sibley
The distinguished Mr Dowd wrote:
You have three problems:
1 – We would have to replace power generating plants that provide 62.7% of our sparktricity at an accelerated pace, one far beyond normal replacement for age. These costs have to be passed on to the consumer.
2 – The renewable fuels power plants simply do not generate as much electricity as steam generators powered by fossil fuel combustion. This means that it would take more renewable energy plants to be built than the number they would replace.
3 – Transitioning to plug-in electric vehicles would require a roughly 30 to 50% increase in electric generating capacity, meaning that more power plants would be needed.
Sibley typed: If you want to shut down an economy, heavy taxes are the way to go
Sibley the Idiot doesn’t understand taxes, even though he used to be an H&R Blockhead.
US top marginal income tax rate reached 94% after WWII and stayed above 70% until the Reagan tax revolt – increased FICA taxes on working Americans and slashed the top marginal rate on the super rich.
How did America do after WWII? The economy was booming. We built the interstate system, schools and universities, and the greatest middle class in history. Workers had enough income to support a family, send kids to college, take a vacation, buy a house…
We now have low taxes on the wealthy and we’re worse off.
Those low taxes on the wealthy were the work of generations of Democrat Congresses. Just because top marginal income tax rate reached 94% after WWII doesn’t mean there weren’t scads of loopholes.
And the rest has nothing to do with taxing the rich because the rich don’t make enough to shoulder the burden, especially with IdiotCare, Green Nude Eel, EBT for everybody, etc. That’s the catch.
Unless you tax the middle class and the working stiffs to death the way they do in Euroland, you can’t afford all that.
And I understand taxes enough to know that the IRS will tell you high taxes stifle an economy and lower ones stimulate it.
Of course, you have to be smart enough to be able to think to understand why that might be.
Mr Dowd wrote:
In 1946, the United States had 46% of the world’s industrial capacity, as our primary industrial competitors had been heavily bombed during the war. That was great, but as our competitors rebuilt, everything they had was new, while we were still dealing with industrial plant that pre-dated the war.
Yes, workers had enough to support a family, etc, but that was because of a strange form of ‘unionization’: with the workforce primarily limited to white men, there was an artificial shortage of workers, thus skewing the supply and demand ratio. Once we allowed women and blacks to compete for all jobs, the supply of workers greatly increased vis a vis the demand for them in the good jobs, depressing real wages.
In the 1950s and 60s, you had to pay a white man enough for him to support an entire family; if you did not, he had to leave and find someone who would. As women entered the workforce in greater numbers, that changed: now a husband and wife, together, had to earn enough to support a family, so men could stay in jobs that didn’t pay them enough to support that family.
Now all we need is a reason to reduce ghg emissions…
Rodney doesn’t understand the Earth’s carbon cycle, that the relatively rapid turnover of cellulose CO2 HASN’T increased CO2 in a million years, but a mere century of converting fossil fuels to CO2 has. Rodney relies on bon mots rather than knowledge, much like Stumpy McTrump.
Rodney should explain that since termites are NOT a new occurrence on Earth why has CO2 only increased in the past century or so, coincident with our burning of coal, gas and oil.
Obviously nitwit thinks man is.
The only thing that’s increased CO2 is fake data.
Idiot boy thinks humans has been burning fossil fuels for millions of years.