"BONN, Germany – Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world's leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change."
"A climate summit held in Copenhagen in December was determined to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide trapping the sun's heat. But the 120 world leaders who met in the Danish capital offered no ideas on how to raise that sum — $1 trillion every decade — prompting Ban to appoint his high-level advisory group."
"In short, a new industrial revolution is needed to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth, he said."
Intemperate questions: How does throwing a wad of cash at some third world banana republic dictator mitigate the so called effects of climate change? How does carbon trading motivate private industry to do anything other than hire lawyers to figure out how to game the system? Does anyone really believe that taxing the snot out of business, hurts anyone other than the consumer? You do understand that all taxes are added to the final price tag of everything you buy, right? Does it surprise anyone that George Soros has a hand in this?
Anonymous2010-08-06T08:27:37Z
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Higher taxes will not change the weather or climate . Who do you pay the weather tax too. Mother nature , leave 100 bills under a rock someplace? Since Soros is invoked with this quackery does he have enough billions and need more?
Climate change isn't going to happen because some liberal said it's going to happen or some conservative says it isn't, it's just physics. BUT raising taxes doesn't have to happen. If the conservatives would stop acting like oil-money druggies and go back to pragmatism, they could easily fight for and win caps on taxation from liberals in exchange for switching to resource taxation. And even if GW wasn't happening, it would be less-bad from a conservative economics standpoint to tax un-renewable resources than to tax labor or production (income taxes, VAT). Doubly so if you're pro-America rather than pro-Saudi-Arabia.... somehow people aren't noticing that if this is a swindle it's a big swindle by non-OPEC countries at the expense of OPEC.
One of the sad parts of this whole debate is the general immaturity and silliness of the "skeptic" movement has created a lot of noise in the debate instead of a real debate about what to do -- and yes, Wall Street greed has stepped in with cap and trade ideas that are distinctly designed to subsidize them, when we could easily have a left-right compromise like switching from sales tax to carbon tax that should make everyone -- except the oil industry -- happy. Wall Street is a very latecomer to the global warming debate, their money all lined up on the skeptic side until the science became rather overwhelming, but now they'll take a cut if we try to save ourselves, if we let them.
One of the clearest "follow the money" views on the climate change debate is how little the skeptic political/blog arguments track straightforward conservative economic theory, and how much they track the oil industry interests. The oil industry would suffer (here and OPEC) from lowering sales taxes or income taxes and raising carbon taxes.
Instead there will continue to be spurious arguments about the science until we face a real crisis, and then we'll be spending money on reclamation, flood control, migration, farm issues, probably wars and dozens of other crises that people will insist the gov't help with, PLUS at that point there won't be space or respect for conservative economic views on keeping taxes down. The skeptic movement, freed from "conservative" oil and Wall Street interests, could pretty easily turn even a false GW scare into a tax-neutral push for economic efficiency. Why aren't you?
"Flying is a major source of pollution," Turbine powered aircraft are pretty clean, those running on petrol can be pretty nasty thanks to 100LL. In terms of CO2, they should be taxed, but so should everything else that emits CO2 (including power plants and cars). Aviation is a minor contributor to global warming and also one where we don't really have any alternatives so we should be spending our resources dealing with bigger sources where we do have alternatives (such as fossil fuel electricity that could be replaced by nuclear fission). With short flights of up to around 1000 km high speed trains could provide roughly the same travel time (when boarding, going through security, driving to airport outside of city, etc are taken into account) as planes although to get the full environmental benefit from that you'd have to use nuclear electricity to run the trains (as they do in France), for longer distances there's really nothing that can compete with air travel. As for what the money from a carbon tax should be used for, I'd say we invest it for mitigation work.
Yeah, I'd like to pursue options that involve smaller government and lower taxes. I've yet to see those options. Its pretty clear the real agenda has nothing to do with climate control and everything to do with people control.
Now if you wackos will only use your common sense and read some of these answers, you will see the true danger of global warming. Oh! that's right, global warming alarmist have no kind of sense. And no it would not surprise me to find soros involved, if it is evil or wrong for the majority, I expect to see George Soros, the evil, speculating, puppet master involved.
Gary F,
Gary, Gary, Gary,
I am still here trying my best to teach my liberal followers something, now you come along to confuse them.
I see Trevor is here too, how about three of my favorite people on Yahoo on the same question.