Carbon tax proposals seem to be showing up more frequently of late. Now if we had strong evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was the cause of alleged global warming and that warming is undesirable and must be prevented from increasing, maybe such a tax would be worth consideration. But this is hardly the case. It is clear that increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent decades has not had a significant effect on temperatures, but rather that increases in CO2 are due to higher temperatures. So how would a carbon tax help anything?
The next question is whether global warming is desirable or undesirable. I argue that on balance it is desirable. In tropical oceanic areas maximum temperatures appear to be amazingly similar. If so, presumably any global warming is likely to be elsewhere. Many of these areas are colder than optimum for humans or their crops. So it is not clear that reducing CO2 emissions would be desirable even if they did decrease temperatures more than they would otherwise be.
So I see no positive effects of decreasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, the miracle molecule that makes life on Earth possible and stimulates plants to grow. If so, the question is whether increases in taxes on a new basis would be desirable. Many Democratic politicians seem to believe that tax increases would be good, particularly if the people paying the taxes do not object and would not vote for those promoting the taxes out of office. But such an outcome appears highly unlikely, especially given the yellow-vest riots in France last year.
The most important single reason for the huge increase in economic welfare in high income countries is the combustion of fossil fuels to obtain reliable, usable energy, which results in higher emissions of carbon dioxide. Without fossil fuels the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred. Taxing emissions of a molecule that is responsible for much of the modern world results in lower use of fossil fuels and lower benefits from the crucial molecule that made economic progress possible in the modern world. Doing so is surely one of the worst ideas ever proposed. And it is all based on junk science endlessly repeated by the Climate Industrial Complex.
Government taxation should be designed to minimize its adverse effects on the economy, not maximize these effects.
[…] http://www.carlineconomics.com/archives/4849 […]
Alarmism is neither madness nor insanity. In the case of Climate Change, it is purposeful. The purpose is to give people a reason to vote for loss of liberty and financial ruin. There is no reason to believe the claims of life or death depending on the massive change to world societies. But, millions and millions of people who vote believe exactly that. Politics needs a massive endangerment in order to save humankind. They’ve worked for 30 years and now the unquestioning youthful politician have arrived. Ignoring them and calling them mad might be madness.
Hello
I can’t remember where I found this article — but it certainly puts emissions from fossil fuel burning in perspective and renders attempts to decrease atmospheric concentrations of CO2 — futile.
EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE (URL) OFFERED IN THIS MESSAGE:
“The grand total produced by all living things is estimated to be 440 billion tons per year, or 13 times the amount of carbon dioxide currently being produced by fossil-fuel emissions. Fossil-fuel emissions are less than 10 percent of biological emissions. Are you laughing yet?”
The hype about carbon dioxide emissions has been referred to as the “Madness of Crowds” — and this decades-long illusion has been responsible for unnecessary policy initiatives, regulations, massive taxpayer financed subsidies to encourage the adoption of unreliable solar and wind electrical generation that can not possibly run a modern energy intensive society, and the distraction of governments and environmentalists from the more important destruction of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem productive capacity that escalates with our constantly growing human population.
Read the article and weep.
Peter Salonius
https://www.westernjournal.com/global-warming-myth-debunked-humans-minimal-impact-atmospheres-carbon-dioxide-climate/
It’s a powerful compaidon that combustion of fossil fuels represents less than 10 percent of carbon dioxide emissions coming from the exhalations of humans and other species.
Even though CO2 is not reliably known to influence climate, the campaign by alarmists ignore more than 90 percent of emissions.
Alarmism is futile as well as ignorant. Doc Carlin aptly calls it madness.
Every week, like clock work, doctor Carlin treats us to an elegantly worded essay about the climate madness and hoax.
I like to lower his lofty standards of literacy down to some low brow basics. Climate alarmism is dunce cap worthy nonsense.
1. The big yellow ball in the sky is called the sun. It has a lot to do with prevailing temperatures, by season, on earth.
2. Carbon dioxide is great. A very low level combines with sunlight to enable phiotosynthesis. This produces green plants. These are in turn eaten by plant grazers, enabling a food web of life on earth. CO2 enables plants and renews oxygen in the air. There are no reliably known harms from carbon dioxide gas. We generate some ourselves.
3. We are made significantly of carbon atoms. They can form four bonds each. Referring to carbon emissions as a problem as environmentalists claim is absurd. Each of us emits CO2 in each exhaled breath. This recycles valuable carbon into the web of life.
4. CO2 is not reliably known to control climate. The only reliable effect is to enable plants to harness solar energy and to grow. cO2 is simply beneficial. Should carbon air emissions be taxed? Of course not. If anything, increase them.
5. We do not even know reliably that temperatures are trending upwards. Claims of worsening climate come from socialist wackos who are mainstream journalists, or from bureaucrats or looney left political leaders.
6. Nobody can identify the 97 percent of scientists are who back alarmism. It’s just a political slogan and worthless?
7. The UN includes unreliable nations like Russia, Iran, n Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. UN environmental programs are not based on reliable science.
When Doctor Carlin opines that this is “madness,” he knows of what he speaks. Gore and Obama are flim flammers and charlatans.
Environmental taxes that do not actually produce genuine benefits for the environment would be an injustice to both taxpayers and to the environment. Carbon taxes are a crazy idea.
Climate policy ideas are a tough problem for CIC hoaxers. Badly performing forecasts. Elementary unwillingness to uphold the scientific method by stating a hypothesis.
But the hoaxers still want the public to shell out bucks for a scheme that offers scant hope of achieving anything.
Why should society shell out money to fix a “problem” that does not even exist in the first place?
This is why Doc calls the alarmist agenda “madness.” It’s political belief pretending to be science..