Again, I think people need to stop getting taken in by the “GW is real/GW is not real” sideshow and keep their eyes on the ball. This is a textbook 3-card monty play to get us all to accept a horrible regressive tax. TBTB are gearing up to tax us on our carbon output and they’ll use that money to pay bureaucrats instead of doing a damn thing to clean up or fix our environment. If you make $25K a year and you drive a car and run your air conditioner, you will pay the same carbon tax as the guy who makes $500K a year and drives a car and runs his air conditioner. The rich guy will pay a little more of course because his house and car are nicer, but the carbon taxes will basically be consumption taxes — regressive and unfairly burdensome on those least able to afford them while leaving the super-rich untouched.
All of these supposed solutions like making a “cap&trade” market and adding new regressive taxes are not going to magically make the problems go away. Again, if we were serious about this problem we would be funding solar energy, wind energy, even nuclear energy, we’d be building public transport systems, we’d be giving incentives for people to live closer to work, but again we’re not hearing any of those ideas.
Think of it like social security. The government added a tax so that we would all be able to survive old age without starving but now it is of course bankrupt and we’re told that we’ll be lucky to receive any benefits at all when we’re old. Yet they keep taking the tax out of our paychecks and they always will. GW is being used to scare everyone into accepting a new carbon tax, but this time it will be even worse because it’s not a progressive tax based on income like SSDI but rather a regressive consumption tax. It is a wicked parlor trick, and the best thing about it is that no one will ever be able to say whether it’s working or not. The government will just release reports saying “We’re putting 10% less carbon into the environment!” and we’ll all ooh and aah and feel good about ourselves and meanwhile the hurricanes will keep coming and the ice will keep melting.
