Free Republic

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.

Australian Political Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has today stunned observers by reversing his position on a carbon tax – ruling out any future reinstatement of a carbon tax.According to The Sydney Morning Herald; “We will not have a carbon tax, the Australian people have spoken and Labor is not going to go back to that,” Mr Shorten told reporters in Sydney on Saturday. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bill-shorten-says-labor-wants-to-tackle-carbon-pollution-but-rules-out-return-of-carbon-tax-20141011-114nmp.htmlDespite turning his back on a carbon tax, the Labor Opposition Leader continues to back the introduction of a “market based mechanism” for tackling “carbon pollution”.One of the core platforms of the current Abbott government, which helped...

You may notice something called a California Climate Credit on your electricity bill. This credit is your share of money from a state program that is fighting climate change. It happens automatically in April/May and October/November for most California homeowners and monthly for most California small businesses – and it’s yours to keep.

Abraham Maslow once suggested that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If a carbon tax isn't the only tool on Thomas Friedman's belt, it's perhaps the most prominent one. So sure enough, when Friedman, as per his New York Times column of yesterday, looks at the dual threat to the United States posed by ISIS and Putin, his solution is, you guessed it, a carbon tax, coupled with freeing up US oil exports. Joe Scarborough struggled to stay respectful, but wound up citing Zbigniew Brzezinski's response in a similar situation: "I remember a couple...

Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall’s (Colo.) wife called for a carbon tax while appearing in a new anti-oil video produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. “People are ready for conversation,” says Maggie Fox, Udall’s wife and former president of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, in the Green World Rising video, entitled, “Carbon.” “They’re ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge and that there is a simple solution: put a price on carbon pollution,” she says. DiCaprio is releasing a series of environmentalist videos on climate change, the first focusing on gathering support for a cap and trade system. A...

The former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin wrote in the Washington Post on July 27, 2014, “How ignoring climate change could sink the U.S. economy.” Not counting the non-enforced southern border and the hordes of new and lawless Democrat citizens who demand their fair share of the American dream now turned into a welfare nightmare, the national debt is most likely to sink the economy sooner than any other variable and that includes climate change that has been changing for millennia.

Gov. Jerry Brown was about to leave Mexico’s capital after four days of talks pressing on the environment, and he wasn’t sure, broadly speaking, how his diplomacy might add up. Meetings held out of public view – dinner with business magnate Carlos Slim and talks with the poet Homero Aridjis and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a founder of Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, among others – were “more critical” on any number of issues, Brown said, than was on display at his official functions. “Some of the more private guys,” Brown said, were “not that optimistic” that people are interested...