Free Republic

The EPA may be making some major changes to its carbon dioxide emissions regulatory scheme, the details of which have been leaked to the media just days ahead of its expected release date. The EPA will be getting rid of its energy efficiency building block of its Clean Power Plan over legal concerns the agency was overstepping its bounds by controlling how efficiently people used their electricity, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reported the Clean Power Plan will encourage nuclear power production. An EPA spokeswoman would not confirm the reported changes to the rule as it has...

The debate is finally over. After more than a year of national consultations, draft bills and parliamentary discussions, French MPs finally adopted the bill for an Energy Transition for Green Growth on Wednesday 22 July. The substance of this far-reaching bill was subject to significant re-shaping by both houses of the French parliament, as well as the government. […] The adopted bill contains several last minute additions, including a Senate amendment to increase the carbon tax on fossil fuel use to €56 per ton in 2020, a four-fold increase, and €100 in 2030. “The trajectory of the carbon tax increase...

Sen. Chuck Schumer outlined a path Tuesday for Hillary Clinton to enact a carbon tax if the Democrats prevail in the 2016 elections. Schumer said that a Clinton presidency and the return of his party to the Senate majority in 2017 could pave the way for lawmakers to enact a carbon tax to help fund the government. The mere suggestion of a new fee on the emissions blamed for climate change, however, could become a political headache for Clinton and other Democrats, and it’s routinely dismissed by Republicans. Schumer also vowed that Democrats would successfully defend President Barack Obama’s landmark...

Whitehouse: "I extend an open hand, or an olive limb, to conservatives everywhere."Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have proposed a bill that would establish an economy-wide tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. “My bill sets the fee for a ton of carbon at $45 in 2016, the central range of the social cost of carbon as estimated by OMB, and would increase it each year at a real 2 percent. When emissions fall 80 percent below 2005 levels, the annual adjustment would fall to inflation,” Whitehouse said at the American Enterprise Institute when presenting...

In April 2009, as the political right was finding its voice in the tea party, South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis was making the case for a carbon tax. “I’m a conservative. I believe in accountability,” he said. “Global warming is not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of facts.” He added, “We don’t want to be a party of deniers.” Most of his party disagreed. A year later, Inglis was trounced in a Republican primary, his staunchly conservative record proving insufficient to overcome this heretical deviation. On the surface, it may appear that little has changed in the...

After years of opposing efforts to fight climate change, Europe’s biggest oil and gas corporations have made a stunning about-face. Noticeably absent from the corporate push for a carbon price were U.S. oil behemoths Chevron and Exxon Mobil.

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m every minute of every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments. The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused...

To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they've begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives. Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent...

That’s a startling question, to be sure. But it’s a question that haunted me during my recent visit to Australia. There, political conservatism is experiencing a revival of sorts after six years of socialist wilderness. While in Australia, I kept thinking about a surprising statement made to me by a prominent American conservative leader during the last U.S. election. At that time, he said, “I will not support the Republican candidate. In fact, I hope Obama wins.” When I couldn’t hide my shock, he went on to explain his perspective: eventually the socialist ideology in our country would over-tip its...

A new study debunks the theory that melting permafrost in the Arctic region will release a “carbon bomb” that will cause catastrophic global warming. “The data from our team’s syntheses don’t support the permafrost carbon bomb view,” A. David McGuire, a climate scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, said in a statement. News reports have hyped up the study saying melting Arctic permafrost could release lots of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere — only adding to worries that global warming will get out of control....

Is a recently proposed Department of Interior rule change a classic "bait-and-switch" plan designed to curtail energy production rather than benefit taxpayers? Opponents of fossil fuel development would have you believe a change is necessary. This proposal would undo the current valuation of coal and replace it with a complex system designed to punish coal producers with higher costs and significant uncertainty. It is not about maximizing revenue for taxpayers; it's about cutting off production of federal coal from Wyoming and other states. ADVERTISEMENT The anti-fossil fuel crowd regularly invokes the same tired argument in a failed attempt to prove...

Swiss voters Sunday overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have scrapped the Alpine country’s value-added-tax system and replaced it with a carbon tax. Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative while 8% supported the measure. The initiative would have encouraged Swiss households to use renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, which would have been exempt from taxes. The initiative, which was introduced by the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland, was designed to help lower carbon emissions and reduce global warming. A proposal replacing the main consumer tax with a new levy on non-renewable energy has suffered a blistering defeat...

"I am under 'investigation,'" professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder posted on his blog Wednesday. The top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, sent a letter to university President Bruce Benson that asked the school to provide its financial disclosure policies and information on how they apply to Pielke, as well as any drafts and communications involving Pielke's testimony before Congress between Jan. 1, 2007, and Jan. 31, 2015. In 2013, Grijalva explained, Pielke told the Senate that it is "incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with...

When prominent members of both political parties talk about the possibility of taxing fossil fuels – you know something serious has shifted in U.S. politics. On Monday morning, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a largely pro-business Democrat, published a column in The Washington Post calling for the imposition of a carbon tax.

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” The Bard was right, and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that we have reached just such a point. We have a unique opportunity to end the rancorous debate about climate change, a debate that is poisoning the air — the political air, that is — and inhibiting progress on two fronts: progress on addressing the possibility that we are on the road to...

Will the United Nations wield its unproven claim that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change to require each of its 193 member nations to measure and report GHG emissions — a prerequisite for a global carbon tax? Does it really matter whether next year’s meeting in Paris produces a treaty, or a “soft law” document, or both? Todd Stern, head of the American delegation at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Lima, Peru, said the U.S. is “perfectly happy to have an assessment process.” He said this would produce “clear and understandable” Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)...

Meanwhile, plastic is a million times more useful and durable than the Preston Mannings who get to con the political world. Don’t know whether Sun News Media star Ezra Levant would could consider Yours Truly, too far down on the ‘Anybody Important List’ as a colleague, but because we are two in the tiny handful of news types touting conservative viewpoints, I consider Levant mine. Levant, who used to work as an Assistant, is openly “disappointed” with former Canadian Reform Party Leader Preston Manning’s big switcheroo on global warming/climate change specifically with the Reformer of old now trying to con...

A recent blog post on Sightline, an environmental blog in the Northwest, celebrated the gusher of dependable revenue to Washington State flowing from a steep carbon tax. The post showcases just why a carbon tax is a dangerous policy. As we at IER have been warning for years, the advocates of a carbon tax are fooling themselves if they think it will be calibrated to the “optimal” level reflecting the “negative externality” of greenhouse gas emissions. And in this debate the most foolish of all are the handful of vocal conservatives claiming that a new carbon tax will be used...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-10-21/gore-to-stand-in-at-udall-fundraiser

Whew. Doesn’t that sound so much better?Every now and then we get a conservative case for a carbon tax, an idea so terrible that even Australian labor has given up on it. The idea mainly involves finding other names for it. Carbon tax sounds so taxing. How about Carbon net tax benefit? Carbon earned income tax credit? Now we’re going with 100 Percent Returnable Emissions Tax.