Letter to the editor: Congress must address climate change, for our children Angie Winter

Found here. Our comments in bold

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The letter writer is a supporter of the Citizens' Climate Lobby. This noble-sounding organization is a leftist advocacy group pushing for more taxes. They want to convince you into consenting to taxing yourselves by dangling a carrot called a dividend. This dividend would supposedly mitigate the impact of the fee. They claim: "A national carbon price, with full revenue return and border adjustments, will do four things: internalize the social cost of carbon-based fuels, rapidly achieve large emission reductions, stimulate the economy & recruit global participation. And it will do so for FREE." Yes, they really believe it is free.

Here's a chart from their website:

Notice in step one they want a carbon "fee" [tax] which would be applied "at the point where they [greenhouse gases] first enter the economy." The point at which carbon enters the economy is not the point where carbon enters the ecosystem. The only point where carbon enters the economy is when oil, gas and coal producing companies sell their products. Therefore, the intent of the Citizens' Climate Lobby is to tax oil, coal, and gas companies with an escalating tax, obviously intended to become confiscatory at some point: "The fee would start out low — $15 per ton — and gradually increase $10 each year." 

Let's try to get an idea what this tax would mean to the oil industry. The government says that burning a gallon of gasoline creates about 20 pounds of CO2, and in the U.S. we used 134,506,764,000 gallons in 2013. That generates 690,135,280,000 pounds of CO2, or 345,067,640 tons. Just from gasoline. So the amount of the tax, just for the first year level, is $5.2 billion. 

The energy business intends to operate a profit, so this additional cost of doing business will be incorporated into the price of energy. This tax will be passed down in the cost of their product, which all downstream businesses will pay, and they will do the same with the price of their products. This will trickle down through the economy until it gets to the end user. You. 

You and I will pay this tax. All of it.

According to the International Business Times, U.S. oil company profits were $33.4 billion, only a part of which is gasoline, of course. "Refineries in the United States produced an average of about 12 gallons of diesel fuel and 19 gallons of gasoline from one barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil in 2013." So this means that gasoline is about 45% of a typical barrel of oil. So roughly, $15.3 billion of that profit is from gasoline.

Now, let's do the numbers. We bring in the $5.2 billion tax and add it atop $15.3 billion in revenue. This tax, at least for the first year only, will add 1/3 to the price of a gallon of gas, minimum. My 2008 Toyota RAV4 uses about 30 gallons of gas per month, or 360 per year. With the carbon tax added in, this vehicle will cost an additional $400 to drive, and again, this is just for the first year. 

Then add a second vehicle, as well as the same tax applied to your home's natural gas, each business's heating bill, necessary wage increases, the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods, and you might as well add 50% to the cost of living. Just for the first year.

Then, tax will increase by $10 per ton each year. At the end of year three, the tax will have tripled. 

Citizens' Climate Lobby tells us that carbon tax revenue would be rebated to the consumer. This is step two, above. As one reads further, we discover each household would receive a dividend from a government "trust fund," which contains the accumulated revenue of the carbon tax. Disbursements from this fund would supposedly cover the increased cost of energy resulting from the tax. 

Step three appears to be price and competition controls.

This continues for the few years until the cost of the tax and the rebate amount are absolutely huge. And yet no one in this circle of death seems to have any incentive to lower carbon emissions. The consumer getting reimbursed, and the producer is charging what he needs to.

In effect, what we now have is a perpetual motion machine. The government taxes energy, energy gets more expensive, the tax money is given to the consumer to pay to the energy company for covering the extra expense, the energy company gets a tax increase the next year of an additional 67%, (existing tax of $15 per ton plus another $10 per ton) which they also pass on in their prices. Even more tax money gets paid out of the trust fund to the consumer.

Hmm.

Now, imagine this plan being implemented. Your income no longer covers the cost of your expenses, because you are hanging on for dear life waiting for the arrival of the rebate check at the end of the year. Surprise, the check is less than you thought. But the next tax increase has already kicked in, and your income hasn't increased that much. Now you're in an even bigger hole than before, again waiting for the next rebate check. 

By year five, you can't buy gas any more, your gas powered vehicle is obsolete and valueless, you can't afford to buy an electric vehicle, which would make no sense anyway since electricity is largely produced by carbon fuels. You can't afford to heat your house or even buy groceries, because everything has tripled in price. The rebate didn't calculate its overall effect on the economy because the government never gets stuff like this correct.

Businesses don't get a rebate, even though energy costs have been passed on to them as well. Some businesses might try to pass on the expense in the price of their products, but this makes them hugely more expensive and people just won't be buying them because their disposable income is being used just to stay afloat. Each year gets worse until the economy shuts down.

This is what Citizens' climate lobby calls a free market solution.

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This morning, I watched our two-week old grandson sleeping peacefully. I marveled at his perfection — 10 fingers, 10 toes, dark hair. Thriving on his mother’s milk, his body is yet untouched by chemicals we put in our food, or any number of other environmental factors such as smoke in the air.

What will it take to maintain this “clean slate”?

I imagined his future trips to Montana for family vacations, and I dreamed of showing him Glacier National Park, with glaciers! (Would that include transportation via a fossil-fuel burning automobile?)

I prayed that the family log home we built near Kila (Log construction takes more wood to construct.)

will survive potential forest fires long enough for him to remember visiting it. (Were there zero forest fires before the industrial age?)

I tried not to get gloomy about the planet that we are leaving in the hands of this generation. Instead, I re-dedicated myself to doing what I can — which includes my volunteer work with Citizens’ Climate Lobby. (Emphasis added. See discussion above.)

As our members of Congress return to work this fall, I am urging Reps. Downing and Zinke, and Sens. Daines and Sheehy, to prioritize bipartisan solutions that advance clean energy and cut climate pollution. (Because there are apparently no environmental laws on the books already.

Let's take a look at where carbon is being emitted:

Well, interesting. Apparently the letter writer should take the time to find out which countries are the biggest violators and write her letters to their newspapers. It would be a safe bet that those countries don't care a whit about her opinion.

 

And by the way, what is climate pollution, and how is it different than regular ol' pollution?)

It is a public health issue, especially for children and other vulnerable populations.

Members of Congress: If you won’t do it for them, will you do it because it strengthens U.S. leadership and competitiveness? (??? Placing additional requirements, expenses, and regulations on the economy will strengthen it? Again, see above discussion.)

Will you do it to prevent extreme weather disasters in our communities? Or to lower household energy costs (Has the letter writer read the Citizens' Climate Lobby plan to add an increasing tax to carbon-based energy?)

while building a stronger, more reliable grid? (Without fossil fuels, there will be no grid, let alone a stronger one.)

Pick your motivation and be bold. Do it for the children. (Yes, the emotive manipulation of the anti-intellectuals: Do it for the children. It's not for us. It doesn't matter what it costs. It doesn't matter that we can't measure the efficacy. It doesn't matter what it does the prices of products we buy. No, do it for the children.)

Angie Winter

Kila