It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by shell310
I'm in Canada B.C. and we've had a carbon tax since 2008.
www.fin.gov.bc.ca...
Listen up, Congressional leaders, to Thomas L. Friedman’s phenomenally good idea: Phase in carbon taxes to both cut the deficit and tame carbon emissions.
The overarching objection to carbon taxes is that they’ll hurt economic growth. Well, any of the solutions to our deficit problem will do that, so we might as well at least get the huge societal benefits of carbon reduction as a silver lining to that cloud. This would truly be a grand bargain.
A recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers warns that the nation’s infrastructure is in bad repair. Levies, sewers and water systems, bridges, waterways and highways are past their needed age of replacement. Upgrading costs are in the multi-billions and are going unaddressed.
As climate change brings us new weather challenges, the nation’s infrastructure needs will necessarily have to compete with the cost of disaster relief: droughts, agricultural losses, floods and storms. It is difficult to see how all these needs can be met even if we had a functional political system.
These competing needs cannot be allowed to go unmet, yet we cannot afford all that the future portends without adding to the bloated debt. Therefore, we must act to reduce the likelihood of future climate-related disasters which threaten to drain the public purse and forestall needed public projects.
We can speed the transition to clean energy and reduce our use of climate-changing fossil fuels most quickly, efficiently and effectively if we enact a carbon tax on coal, oil and natural gas, levied at the source, and increasing year over year until CO2 ppm are reduced to 1990 levels. This revenue should be returned to the American people as a direct dividend in full or part in order to offset any price increases in basic consumer goods.
Jeanne Johnson,
7th Congressional District
Citizens Climate Lobby
Alexandria, MN