Tax Carbon, Lower Other Taxes to Offset the Expense.

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The climate is changing, carbon emissions are to blame. A tax on carbon, proponents claim, will encourage growth in the clean energy sector and could be offset by tax cuts in other areas, so it doesn't seem like everyone getting hit with a tax hike.

Good or bad idea?

Why or why not?

In the 1970s, the world was told to fear "Global Cooling" and debated turning the polar regions black with ash to "warm" the doomed planet. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the world was told to fear "Global Warming" and is still spraying geo-engineering "ChemTrails" which include powdered aluminum to reflect sunlight and "cool" the doomed planet. Since the Climatic Research Unit email controversy of 2009, the world has been told to fear either NASA astronauts and scientists who express doubts about man-made climate change, or IPCC scientists who express their own fears that global climate change is real and that there is little that can be done about it because: 1) it is too late to reverse course, or 2) global climate change has always existed and will continue to fluctuate. The one fact on which both sides seem to agree is that, on the question of CO2, the planet's oceans produce far more of the gas than humans could ever dream of producing. Despite all that, average global temperatures have fallen in the last 20 years; so, maybe we are back to trying to "warm" the planet, again.

Until the proponents of global climate change stop vacillating and determine whether the problem is global warming or cooling, I couldn't care less about any of the much-touted solutions.

carbon emissions...and a whole lot of other things.

Just let fossil fuels run out. No matter what science discovers, there'll be plenty of sources of misinformation catering to all tastes, and people will exercise their unquestionable right to believe whatever they want, evidence be damned. So nothing will get done. Resistance is shorted out..., I mean, futile.

We can't stop the world from developing, anything we do won't come close to offsetting what is happening China and India and elsewhere. Anything that would make a difference would be akin to a vow of poverty and even that would mean nothing in the long run. We have enough fossil fuels for to last us for the rest of our lifetimes at least, invest more into nuclear power and incentivise going off the grid.

Carbon taxes are broadly a good idea, but only if they actually provide an incentive to reduce emissions. If they just shrink the gap, then all they do is raise prices, which can be disastrous for the poor.

I was a big fan of the UK's policy of exempting low-emission vehicles from tax.

The other thing that is really important is government support for positive measures such as clean electricity generation, particularly nuclear power. Vehicle electrification is of limited benefit if the power is still coming from fossil fuel combustion.

Finally, supporting international development has to be a major part of tackling global warming. We need to support developing countries in meeting their energy needs from clean energy. Energy consumption is vital for increased quality of life, but clean energy is more expensive than the dirty stuff we've relied on since the Industrial Revolution.

No, they haven't. This has been well debunked. Temperatures have only fallen if you deliberately select your data points to create that impression, by comparing 1997 (a year at the peak of the El Nino cycle) with an incongruously cold year (I can't remember which, maybe 2009?). There's still a clear upward trend.


That has happened... There is overwhelming evidence, and consequently overwhelming scientific consensus, that the problem is global warming.

It always have been a minority view.


Chemtrails are a myth and the the accepted explanation for the contrails formation make perfect sense and can be seen on the gound form the thick vapor clouds forming from the exhaust of cars during cold canadian winter days. Checking on Wikipedia the climate data of Slat Lake City it seem that the Utah winter are generally not cold enough though.


I don't know what amount of CO2 is coming form the oceans, but I know better that trusting the "facts" you are quoting. It's obvious that you don't inform yourself from trustworthy sources.


Uterlly, completly, totally, absolutly, fully, entirelly, fully FALSE!! !! !!
The temperature is rising, 2015 is currently breaking the heat records and your sources are wrong!

They don't vacillate and pretty much agree that the Earth temperature is rising.


We don't have control on what China and India are doing but we control on what we doing. It wouldn't mean a vow of poverty either as it would bring the rise of new technology. In long term doing nothing is many time more disastrous for the economy. (New York could end up flooded for example.)

Maybe some president of the US should have decided China and India had weapons of mass destruction, or were hosting some prominent terrorist, and devastated them before they became too powerful.

Both those countries are known to have WMDs. And what positive effect would that bring?

Hm..., the same devastating Iraq and Afghanistan did, except on a bigger scale?

So nothing then. OK.

Unless you're seriously suggesting that ISIS is a positive effect?

We are taxing carbon by oil trading priced in American dollars.

It is not simple, yes 2015 is hot, but still about four degrees below Roman times.

That may not equate because sea level has been rising, and was likely twenty foot lower in Roman times.

The ocean is hotter, but hurricanes have not been forming because hotter water causes upper level winds that shear the top off of storms, not letting them form.

No Climate Model holds up to historic records. If you cannot play it backwards, you cannot play it forward.

It seems to be snowing more between the Great Lakes and the East Coast, but not for long enough to establish a trend.

Hairless Ground Ape Science and Record Keeping still lacks standards. 125 years ago there were no standard thermometers, rain gauges, and Krakatoa going off reduced world temperature by several degrees, at the few stations who were keeping records. Locations and methods lacked calibration.

From all of the people of the time, WWII made it rain more. It was also mentioned about WWI.

Between them was drought, dustbowl, and a lot of tornados.

Long term records such as the grape harvest going back 800 years in Europe show longer term warming, cooling, wet and dry periods. Glaciers have been retreating and advancing for as long as records have been kept, about two hundred years.

We have a lack of base data, and a climate system to complex to model, plus unknown Solar cycles.

The climate of Rome is now being called a total disaster that will roast us all in 500, 300, 100, years.

Clean air and water will not hurt us. Leaving space for nature to continue is very important, they die, we die.

Change to the extent of changing the climate seems beyond us, and longer term we are in an ice age, and times as warm as today have been 20,000 out of the last 150,000 years.

From the late fifties to the early seventies the trend line was to cooling. I do not think it was us that caused it to reverse and warm to 2000. Since then it has leveled out. We are slowly warming.

An action should be proven possible and needed before acting.