It's back to square one for President Sarkozy's carbon tax
UPDATE | 10:10 AM: The tax was set at 17 euros ($24.38) per ton of carbon-dioxide emissions. However, to ensure passage the legislation ended exempting almost 93 percent of all industrial carbon emissions in France. Read More »
UPDATE: Congress Matters gets right to the heart of what we were writing about earlier: Sen. Max Baucus is stacking the deck against the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill in order to weaken it. Notably, the American Council on Capital Formation, where witness Margo Thorning works, has received a little over $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil since 1998. Let’s see, just for fun, if natural gas, which Exxon has been pushing recently, in her testimony tomorrow.
ORIGINAL POST: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will get his chance to tear into climate change legislation that is, at best, adrift and without a hope of passing in its current form.
Baucus, the only Democrat who voted against the Kerry-Boxer legislation in the Environment and Public Works Committee, has promised deference in at least the allocation of allowances.
He told ClimateWire’s Darren Samuelsohn:
“I don’t want to say we’re going to do something totally different,” he said. “I’m respectful of the House allocation.”
But, if the witness list is any indication, he’s going to look at import taxes to protect American manufacturing and more nuclear. At least two out of the five witnesses , curiously, don’t support climate change legislation at all. Read More »
WSJ’s Environmental Capital, riffing on our earlier post on Exxon Mobil head Rex W. Tillerson, poses an interesting question. If so many influential players support a carbon tax, can it be all bad?
A movement, like the call for a carbon tax, that can gather Al Gore, James Hansen, Rex Tillerson, Peter Orszag and Greg Mankiw under one roof must have something going for it.
One thing that a carbon tax has going for it: simplicity (though, again, Joe Romm at Climate Progress argues that is a fallacy). You need only look at the doorstops that are Waxman – Markey and Kerry – Boxer – which is amazingly vague, even at 800-plus pages – to see that cap-and-trade is not simple.
A particularly forceful analysis of the cap-and-trade v. carbon tax comes from, of all places, ESPN.com’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, which is written by policy wonk Gregg Easterbrook. It bears the catchy title, “Al Gore Heartbroken That World Refuses to End”, and please note, Easterbrook is, in most respects, not a conservative:
The current House-passed greenhouse gas bill, stalled in the Senate, is nightmarishly bad legislation – more than 1,400 pages of special-interest favors for political donors, command-and-control bureaucracy and handouts to the privileged. If enacted, it will do little to reduce greenhouse gases, while discrediting the notion of climate change legislation. Artificial global warming stands a better chance of being prevented if the House bill is mulched for recycling and a simple carbon tax enacted.
Which brings us back to Rex Tillerson, who said on Thursday “that the American people want climate policy to be transparent, honest, and effective.” It’s certainly a fair point, but until Exxon starts lobbying (read: throwing lots of dollars around) for a viable carbon tax, it will be tough to believe that the company wants climate change legislation of any sort.
