Climate Change, Carbon Credits and Taxes: How Can Anyone Afford to Save the World?
Categories: Featured
Written By: Tax Rascal
“The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge, but all economies know that the only sensible long term way of developing is to do it on a sustainable basis.”
—Tony Blair
“We know that evidence based policy is window dressing, and now, when they want us to believe them on climate science, to justify Stern’s paltry 1% of global GDP [over $600 billion]to mitigate a global horror, we doubt.”
” A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
—Senator Everett Dirksen
Climate change! As we shiver through another cold winter day, we often wonder: why did they stop calling it “Global warming,” again?
But climate change is a serious issue. If you squint through the smoggy haze put out by 1200 limos and 140 private jets, you can see the serious faces of politicians trying to decide just how fast they can get away with spending your money. But perhaps you’ve wondered which money pits we’re going to be filling up first. With that in mind, I’d like to present the Taxrascal Climate Change Spending Guide.
Tax and spend (and spend, and spend). This one’s easy. What if we made it harder to do something that caused pollution (like manufacturing things, or transporting them to customers), and made it easier to do things that polluted less (like forming Diversity Committees or inventing new holidays)? We could save the planet!
Tax (and tax) and spend. High taxes in general might be a great way to cripple the economy, but what if you just want it to develop a limp? One suggestion is to only tax the activities that pollute the most, like drilling for oil or burning coal. That’s the theory, anyway. But whenever a particular industry’s profits are mostly determined by the government, you can bet that the industry is going to lobby hard to make sure things turn out the way it wants them to. If Exxon has ten billion dollars riding on how the government feels about it.
Use carbon credits. Carbon credits are a way to pay people for how they could pollute, but don’t. This is an elegant solution since it turns pollution into something subject to supply and demand. The devil is in the details, and the details are devilishly complicated: how do you determine who is a potential polluter? Do you really want to pay Russia and Ukraine for how inefficient they used to be, even though they still pollute a lot?? It’s a little like paying convicted criminals not to be criminals any more: sure, it might prevent repeat offenders, but it also gives everyone a good reason to be bad before they decide to be good.
Invest in “Alternative Energy.” An alternative to what, you ask? Apparently it’s an alternative to sanity: we’d be giving away money to the most expensive kinds of energy production, and taking it from the cheapest. But look at the cost of solar power:
Imagine paying ten times as much for all the energy you use! (And that’s assuming it costs what they say it does, and that we can cheaply get rid of our oil-, gas-, and coal-based infrastructure. Not likely!)
Just. Sue. Everybody. The most efficient way to separate people from their money is to give your lawyer a cut. Some of them make the process easy: the Cueto law firm is now accepting payment in carbon credits (which is like a mob lawyer handling your case for free so long as his biggest competitor suffers an unfortunate “accident”).
As you can image, this is a complex issue. Saving the world isn’t cheap, even when you’re spending other people’s money! But you can rest assured that, in the end, our political leaders will address climate change somehow. And that your wallet will be lighter because of it.
