Zubrin: Growing Cap and Trade on the Tax Farm

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/growing-cap-and-trade-on-the-tax-farm/

In the current set of bailouts, the government collects income taxes and gives the money to Wall Street. Under cap-and-trade, the government will sell well-heeled financiers the right to impose a massive and extremely regressive electricity sales tax on the nation and collect the revenue for their own profit directly. This will take kleptocracy to an entirely new level.

The Obama administration says that it hopes to raise some $650 billion in revenue for Uncle Sam through the sale of cap- and-trade carbon permits, and there is no reason to doubt this figure. However, that is only the government's piece of the action. Because of the tax farming feature built into the system, the cost to the public is likely to be far greater.

While publicly justified by President Obama as a means of achieving petroleum independence, the actual purpose of the cap-and-trade system as conceived by the environmental activists currently formulating White House energy policy is to combat global warming. However it won't contribute to achieving that goal either. Rather, by imposing a costly tax on the U.S. economy, cap-and-trade will cause American-made goods to cost more, allowing them to be displaced to an ever greater degree by those manufactured elsewhere, most notably China. As a result, the American economy will contract while the Chinese economy expands at U.S. expense. Since an even larger fraction of Chinese electricity and industrial process heat comes from coal than does American, the net effect of the cap-and-trade system will therefore be to increase the total carbon emissions released into the Earth's atmosphere, not decrease it. However not only will Chinese industrialists obtain a larger market share for their products, they will be able to charge more for them, since their competition will be priced even higher. Thus the big losers overall will not only be American manufacturers and workers, but the world's poor.

It is very unfortunate that the Obama administration has embraced a policy so thoroughly lacking in merit as cap-and-trade. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, this could be effectively advanced by removing obstacles to expansion of nuclear power. Instead, the administration has acted to dramatically reinforce such obstacles, most notably by halting the development of a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

But if the goal is, as the president has said, — and as it indeed should be — is to break the hold of the oil cartel, then nuclear power, windmills, and certainly cap-and-trade electricity taxes are all off the subject. Rather, what is needed is a vehicle fleet that can run on liquid fuels that can be obtained independent of OPEC and its allies. This goal could be most quickly achieved by passing a law, such as the Open Fuel Standards Act (HR 1476), requiring that the majority of new cars sold in the U.S.A be fully flex fueled, i.e. able to run equally well on gasoline, ethanol, or methanol (which can be manufactured from any kind of biomass whatsoever, as well as coal, natural gas, and recycled urban trash). Since such a law would impel foreign car makers to switch their lines over to conform to the open fuel standard, this would rapidly transform the global automobile fleet so as to make it compatible with fuels that can be readily produced from non-petroleum sources worldwide, thereby completely unhinging the vertical monopoly of the oil cartel internationally.