Valley Firms Push California Oil Tax

isabotage3 writes, "Still smarting from California's recent enactment of emissions caps, the oil industry is confronting another assault in the Golden State — this one bankrolled in part by Silicon Valley tycoons pushing to fund conservation and alternative-energy initiatives with a tax on oil output. Slightly more than half the money raised by the Prop 87 tax would be earmarked to help cut gasoline and diesel use. Another 27 percent would be put toward alternative-energy research at California universities. The remainder would be used to help start-ups, retrain energy workers in new fields, and for administration." Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding.

Comments

same old song and dance

[avi33]

It reminds of that manuscript recently dug up from the 14th century.

If there's one thing we don't need, it's the King and his "men of science" dictating their values to the marketplace. It's businesses like mine that are leading this nation to prosperity. If I have to refrain from tossing my pissbucket out the front steps, and deliver it all the way to the cesspool, it will cost me money, and I may have to lay off some peasants as a result. Besides, it hasn't been proven that these so-called bacteria even exist, and if they do, maybe they don't cause the black death. Maybe they will make our teeth straight and white forever. I say we should wait and see.

Sometimes government-mandated values work for the greater good.

Bring it on!

[Travoltus]

We're the world's 6th largest economy. If we tank, they tank. Demand plummets because California's out of the equation. Oil prices fall, and their stock falls.

Plus, we get to pursue alternative energy a lot faster. California will be bruised but we'll come out of it even better off than Brazil.

Then the rest of the world will follow our example, and the oil companies will get bent over like a cocktail waitress wandering into the NFL post game locker room.