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Can Washington State Finally Put a Price On Carbon? (wired.com)
jwhyche writes: Beth Brunton walks around Seattle with a magenta umbrella. At 75 degrees and there not being a cloud in the sky, it gets peoples attention. What she is attempting to do is get people to sign a petition supporting Initiative 1631, known as the "Protect Washington Act." If this was to pass, Washington state would become the first state to adopt anything like a carbon tax. "The initiative proposes a 'fee on pollution' that would put a $15 charge on each metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted in Washington starting in 2020," reports Wired. "That charge would rise by $2 plus inflation every year until the state meets its climate goals, which include cutting its carbon footprint 36 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. The revenue raised would go toward investing in clean energy; protecting the air, water, and forests; and helping vulnerable communities prepare for wildfires and sea-level rise."
The report mentions Washington's previous attempt at a "carbon tax" initiative, which was ultimately rejected. It would have initially charged businesses $25 per metric ton of emissions before ramping up over time.
The report mentions Washington's previous attempt at a "carbon tax" initiative, which was ultimately rejected. It would have initially charged businesses $25 per metric ton of emissions before ramping up over time.
Of course. If Seattle gets to choose, it will pass for sure. If the rest of the state gets a vote, maybe it won't. Seattle has never meant a tax it didn't like.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The article summary mentions no clouds in the sky.... but it describes events taking place in the Pacific Northwest, where such days just do not exist.
Just what this state needs is more taxes, the new electric license plates cost 300 dollars and a monthly fee, sugar tax that includes soda water and diet soda but leaves the starbucks sugar sweet ass drinks sugar tax free...
The pot tax is one of the highest, the alcohol tax is crazy high, the gas tax is stupidly high, and when we get tabs affordable, switch to pay per mile and tax on car value.
Sorry, I don't know how much longer I can stay in this state, we have numerous bills to take our guns after they already gutted us to one of the harshed guns laws in the country. And Seattle is the fastest growing city in the USA, Yeah, read /r/seattle and see people complaining about 3k a month rents and light rail that wont be finished until I retire. (Kinda late). What does that 5k a year in property tax get you? Eating your retirement?
Stupidity...
Exactly how long does it take to make a ton of CO2 for an exhaling human being?
A human exhales about 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per day if they are sedentary, and up to 18.4 pounds if they are very active.
So on average, unless you are an athlete, every 2 years, you exhale a ton of CO2.
It will be fun to see them tax that... $7.50 a year from homeless people, or they are required to quit breathing.
Or does it just seem like Dems always ask stoopid questions?
This is why people don't take anti-government people seriously. Who precisely is talking about taxing people's breath?
It's introduction of the metric system by the back door. The use of metric units will not stand. Instead of $15 per tonne they should charge a proper rate: €14 per long ton.
Nullius in verba
The file name of the proposed bill is: finaltext_1482.pdf. The title is "Initiative Measure No. 1631". The bill is in a typewriter font.
Whoever is involved with that does not seem competent.
A quote from the bill: "(a) A minimum of thirty-five percent of total investments authorized under this chapter must provide direct and meaningful benefits to pollution and health action areas."
To me, that sentence seems written by an incompetent person, because it is an easy requirement to manipulate.
And pretty much all political proposals to penalize "bad" behavior is that they're not designed to respond to feedback. If you're going to do this, the correct way to do it is to designate some desired level of atmospheric carbon. The higher we go above that level, the greater the tax per ton of CO2 becomes. Likewise, the closer the actual CO2 level gets to the desired level, the smaller the tax becomes. (Conceivably it could go negative if it's deemed that too little atmospheric CO2 is also a danger.)
When you don't use a simple feedback mechanism like this to make incentives auto-adjusting, you get the screwed-up situation we currently have with gender "equality" in education. Girls are outperforming boys at every education level. We've reached the goal of gender equality in education, then blown right past it to where girls are now advantaged relative to boys. But the incentives (created when girls lagged behind boys) are still set to favor girls.
Breathing is carbon neutral. While I pay a carbon tax on the gasoline I burn, I don't pay a carbon tax on the firewood I burn for heat., nor for the store bought charcoal I use for barbecuing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Oh never mind. I got the joke now. Silly AC
when the government taxes something because they will use the money to fix things. The reality is most of the money will be diverted right in to the politicians, bureaucrats and rich elites pockets. The corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and elites are incompetent at fixing most problems they create, but they are great thieves, what a joke on the people.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Not in Washington State. Do you want a GPS in your car so they can charge you by the mile? Hope you have a short driveway.
what about the fertilizer for the plants for the food that you ate? you think we'd have all these people here with our carbon from oil? Hahahahahaha! You're only looking one layer deep man. You ARE crude oil not carbon neutral at all bro.
Well we can start killing the homeless under the guise of protecting mother earth.
That seems like a PC solution or maybe a GTA solution.
The tax money will be used to give government employees and other unions a raise to cover the cost of the carbon tax, so they can emit all they like.
Companies will just outsource the dirty parts to companies in other states/countries. Unless you can track how much carbon is released by those out-of-state businesses, there's no way to account for it fairly.
Breathing is carbon neutral. While I pay a carbon tax on the gasoline I burn, I don't pay a carbon tax on the firewood I burn for heat., nor for the store bought charcoal I use for barbecuing.
Actually it's not. But depending on your food source the entire lifecycle may be carbon neutral. Breathing generates CO2 by inhaling O2, and your body then reacts O2 with glucose generating CO2 as a result, it doesn't just strip the other gasses out of the air. This is actually why if you hold your breath you feel the need to breath > buildup of CO2 in your blood (your body doesn't think it needs oxygen, it thinks it needs to expel CO2). We breath in 400ppm and breath out several percent CO2, the same percentage as we lost to O2 (20.9% in, around 19% out). Nitrogen and Argon stay pretty much the same on the way in and out.
However that CO2 you generated takes energy which your cells get from the glucose that was reacted, you get that glucose from food, and some of your food (especially greens) absorb that CO2 you exhale during photosynthesis while growing. Eating your greens is carbon neutral. Eating your steak, well you've moved the reaction down to another living animal, but the cow got its glucose from somewhere too.
So on average, unless you are an athlete, every 2 years, you exhale a ton of CO2.
Which also means on average you consume a ton of CO2 sequested by whatever it is you ate. Now if only the production of what you ate didn't involve belching carbon to the air you would be CO2 neutral. But it's easier to get companies to stop wasting energy during food production than it is to get people to stop breathing.
It will be fun to see them tax that...
Taxes are a handle on the economy to enact policy. Did you elect a politician that promised they will stop people from breathing? More likely you enacted a mouthbreather.
Even at say a dollar a litre for petrol you will spend roughly $1200 for a ton of carbon. $15 doesn't sound to much on that. Not much of a deterrent either mind.
Yep, pretty soon our children will be saddled with so much taxes debt and oppression, there will be no point going on living. Just what the rich and privileged climate alarmists want us to do.
Taxes have all kinds of repercussions to them. I remember the "luxury" tax on Yachts back in the 80s. "Rich people can afford to pay outrageous taxes on their expensive toys" they said. Yes, they can, but they didn't get rich by being stupid. They bought Yachts overseas and over 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. An entire industry was eradicated. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that industries that could pay this tax wont if they can find a way to avoid it. Ultimately ALL taxes are paid by the working people. Either directly or indirectly.
I wish it was that cool here!
By that measure, so is burning gasoline. Carbon isn't created or destroyed, it's merely attached/detached from various other elements.
-Styopa
The basis of the theory is that CO2 created by breathing, eating, etc, is "normal"....it's part of the standard cycle of carbon. Carbon introduced into the environment from sources like oil and coal skew the "normal" cycle because it hasn't been on the planet and part of the cycle for millions of years.
With that in mind then they would theoretically charge you tax on the gasoline ("new carbon") but not on firewood ("existing carbon").
Not that I think it's remotely a good idea anyway, but at least that's the basis.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Oregon.
Idaho.
Perhaps Canada?
It'll be interesting to see how many plants in Washington are shut down to be replaced by plants just across the State Line....
Yeah, they're not going to do that sort of thing automagically, but they won't be putting any new plants in Washington, and as older plants need to be replaced, they'll be replaced in Oregon and Idaho to avoid that extra cost of doing business....
Oh, and is Washington one of those places that's terrified of nuclear power? Just curious....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
By that measure, so is burning gasoline. Carbon isn't created or destroyed, it's merely attached/detached from various other elements.
No it's not. The definition of being carbon neutral is cycling through the atmosphere. Gasoline is digging up sequestered carbon. That wouldn't otherwise cycle back in through the atmosphere. Breathing on the other hand puts CO2 in the atmosphere which gets taken out through the plants we eat.
I favor a pollution tax. Carbon dioxide, however, is not pollution, even if EPA, Scotus, and other deluded people say so. Pollution is something which is toxic. Toxic means it has a direct deleterious effect on living things, not a theorized indirect effect.
For example, maybe we also need a tax on water emission. If we keep burning fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide and water, that water increases the amount of water in the world, and eventually that water will flood our cities. We would therefore need a water tax.
18.4 pounds of CO2 is about 5 pounds of carbon by my calculations. Considering that only a small fraction of food is carbon, you'd have to eat a *lot* of food to be able to burn 5 pounds of carbon without losing weight!
dom
Carbon Neutral isn't enough.
You should sequester the carbon internally instead of exhaling it, by converting your bones to diamond.
Sweden had a similar absurd claim about stopping all greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. Which would, of course, have included farting humans, cows, and reindeer.
So I made up Swedish flag T-shirts that had printed across the yellow horizontal bar "Do Your Part: Don't Fart".
Mileage tax, soda tax, i'll bet somewhere they have a tax on some taxes too.
Short term thinking because its expedient now, it may take 10-20 years to see the effects of these things.
"$15 charge on each metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted"
I own a farm and forest land. My forests and fields absorb about 1,400 tons of carbon dioxide a year from the air as well as cleaning the air of dust, filtering the water (I'm at the top of the water shed) and other benefits to society.
If they are going to charge $15/ton to emit carbon dioxide then then they should be sending me a check for $21,000 for my services of removing said carbon dioxide. Fair is fair.
Well it is all relative, the firewood involves me running a chainsaw and perhaps burning a gallon of gasoline and if I cheap out, a litre of chain oil (there is vegetable based chain oils). And a few gallons of gas to move it sometimes.
Food is likewise dependent on sequestered carbon to one degree or another, tractors, delivery, perhaps fertilizer and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If anyone in Washington actually believed in AGW you would thing they would be protesting the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams, but they are not. When I see greenies protesting a Nuke plant shutdown I'll start to worry about carbon footprint.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
Every damned one of these faux emergencies in which we are told we must act swiftly to "save the planet" eventually outs itself as a scam to transfer more power and more money to politicians. They even do it with some non-planet scale issues, like tobacco (I say this as a non-smoker who DESPISES the stink of tobacco smoke). If tobacco is the killer they claim (as I believe it is) it would be easy to ban it... but nope... they make it into a HUGE cash cow; there's hardly a state in the USA that is not addicted to the tocacco tax dollars and it's a great source of revenue they can periodically increase with little political penalty.
Carbon is the basic element all carbon-based life forms (all life on Earth) depends upon. Carbon dioxide is required for all plant life, and all animals (and people) would die without plants. Carbon is NOT a pollutant! If carbon is truly a planet killer, ban it! Oh, wait, there are trillions of dollars in unfunded government workers unions pensions in the USA that need money and re-directing funds from the schools and the roads has not been enough... time to tax the gas people expell every time they exhale! If you tell the people the true reasons for the tax increases they'll go nuts and drive you from office... so say you need the money "to save the planet".... yeah.... THAT's the TICKET!!
Bill Nye the not to be confused with science guy is advocating a tax on cows. https://www.washingtontimes.co... . Can't make this stuff up. They will try to tax us for exhaling if we let them.
Side from the fact a "consensus" is not science and everyone knows it. Yet people keep believing in the lie.
Per the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a tax can only be collected on forms of INCOME, and a carbon tax isn't.
No citizen has any obligation to comply, and no official judge or police have any obligation or authority to enforce.
I won't be paying anything like that.
Keeping the tax to pick the winners is a sure fire way to create the political will to block it.
Citizens' Climate Lobby (Carbon fee and dividend) and others (Climate Leadership Council) propose a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund - but such that the tax collected is fully refunded. This makes the tax progressive, revenue neutral and politically sustainable.
Australia's carbon tax scheme is often held up as an example of what happens if the crony capitalist types hold out some of the tax to fund their pick-the-winner favorite businesses.
Once again, the crony capitalists (this time on the left) demonstrate their basic failure to understand human nature (and the politics that derive from that nature). Once again, they are selling unicorns.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.