From The Heartland Institute.
By Joe Barnett
Tax would have funded ‘clean energy’ projects
For the second time in two years, Washington State voters rejected a proposal to tax carbon dioxide emissions.
Fifty-six percent of those voting in Washington’s midterm elections said no to a referendum that would have made the state the first in the nation to tax carbon dioxide emissions and the first government anywhere to impose the tax through a direct popular vote.
Initiative 1631 would have imposed a tax of $15 per metric ton on emissions of carbon dioxide, rising by $2 per ton each year until the state met its emissions reduction goals.
The state government had estimated the carbon dioxide tax would generate $2.2 billion in revenue in the first five years.
Slush Fund for Activists?
In contrast to California’s “cap and trade” scheme, which allows emitters to buy and sell unused credits for reducing emissions, Initiative 1631 would have imposed a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases emitted by select utilities and manufacturers and through transportation.
Technically, the proposed imposition would have been a fee under state law, because the revenue would not have been returned to taxpayers or funded general state operations. Instead, the initiative would have created a board to spend the revenue on a variety of “clean energy” projects, mass transit, and so-called environmental justice programs.
One reason the measure failed is voters do not trust politicians or environmental activists to spend the money wisely, says Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, which publishes Budget & Tax News.
“In a year where voters in Washington State gave Democrats increased majorities, they also solidly rejected a big-government carbon tax,” Myers said. “Even in Washington State, the voters made it clear they don’t trust politicians or the environmental community to spend money wisely.”
Big Support from Activists
The tax initiative was widely supported by well-funded environmental activist groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The united support of environmental organizations increased the percentage of yes votes for the 2018 measure by only 4 percentage points over the 2016 measure, which lost by 60 percent to 40 percent.
The failed 2016 ballot proposal would have imposed a supposedly revenue-neutral tax on carbon dioxide emissions, with the money returned to businesses and individual taxpayers through reductions in various state taxes.
National and local environmental organizations opposed legislation proposed by Gov. Jay Inslee (D) in early 2018 to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and send the revenues to the state’s general fund.
Environmental policy should emphasize market solutions, Myers says.
“The choice for good environmental policy is clear: continue to fixate on big-government programs the voters reject, or allow the free market to do more with less, creating prosperity and protecting the environment,” said Myers.
Joe Barnett is a research fellow with The Heartland Institute.
HT/The truly ever industrious Marcus
The lesson from Washington state and the yellow vests is that you have to hide the taxes and blame industry for higher prices. Additionally, put an unelected board in charge of it so no elected official is held accountable. Ever heard of the low carbon fuel standard? For gasoline they wrote an “aspirational” set of regulations believing that cellulosic ethanol would be commercial in a few years. It’s not. Corn based ethanol isn’t low carbon enough but sugar cane based ethanol is. So the state imports Brazilian ethanol from sugarcane and the Brazilians import US corn based ethanol or make their own corn based ethanol to fill out supply. Meanwhile, LCFS credits are at their maximum price (because industry can’t develop solutions as fast as CARB can make rules) and the state’s drivers spend 50% more on gas per gallon than the rest of the nation. Voila – higher fuel prices and no riots.
I live in Washington State and Jay Inslee is our own version of Macron. Google his confrontation with Lord Monckton and you can see what a creep we elected.
Steve O summed it up perfectly. But will any Politician other than our ex PM, Tony Abbott come right out and say as he did, It s all a load of “Crapp”. I doubt it, they might lose a vote or two. .
MJE
Since CO2 is evil, shouldn’t exhaling be taxed? /sarc
Don’t give the leftist eco-nuts any ideas!
You know, I read through the comments most of the time. Mostly good points, excellent science refuting the reported garbage, excellent, funny, pointed puns and one-liners. Excellent reasons why such-and-such a tax is fallacious and won’t work for the given green/environmental/energy proposal.
But no one attacks the elephant in the room: why ANY taxes, period?
Without taxes, NONE of this garbage could even be flitting around any “law-maker’s” or “do-gooder’s” or “philanthropic billionaire’s” brain. They only do it because we let them.
Why do we allow ourselves to be taxed? Why do otherwise sane and reasonable people believe that we need to allow ourselves to be taxed or there would be no roads, no science, no . . . anything “the government” does “for” us?
Since you all usually agree that anything the government does is neither done well nor for anyone’s real good, what is this basic cognitive dissonance?
Taxation, without all the pretty gauze, is theft. Theft, no matter who does it, is universally recognized as immoral and unethical, a crime.
Yet we fill out those papers at “tax time,” and continue to “elect” people whose only real purpose in life is to dream up yet more ways to “tax” us.
Why are we blindly continuing this stupid, most irrational, insane charade? If we all, silently, concertedly, secretly, simply stopped “paying” our ravening masters, all this garbage would simply dry up and blow away.
So really, what’s the catch? From this moment, if even only 10% of us stopped playing their game, they could do nothing — they don’t have the manpower or facilities to round all of us up and imprison us. And the more our success were leaked out to those still thinking they must comply, the fewer would continue to.
The way to defeat the beast is to stop feeding it.
All this back-and-forth about how awful environmental taxes are and would be is entertaining, but to what end? Must we all wait until the suffering gets so great there is either total slaughter of our numbers and countries, or there are ever-escalating and bloody riots to finally overthrow the beast, a la the French Revolution?
What exactly is going on that “civilized” people believe that we must be taxed — robbed by people in uniform, threatening us with guns if we dare not to comply, for people in fine suits to dictate to us that it is our moral duty to let them do it to us — in order to have nice things? Why really do we?
As I mentioned here after election day, our betters will not leave this alone. Jay Inslee and both chambers of the Washington Legislature hard at work on more “solutions.”
From yesterday (12/10/18):
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/after-carbon-fee-defeat-inslee-rolls-out-new-clean-energy-proposals/
Btw, the comment thread for the ST article is pretty interesting when one considers the readership is generally left-of-center. (Sort by Top Comments to clear out the nonsense.)
The people decided not to embrace plan A, but there’s about 400 other plans behind that ready to go. This plan B is ready to go and it can pass this year,” Inslee said at a news conference.
https://www.thenewstribune.com/latest-news/article222909995.html
Get ready for moar.
What always gets me with reports like this is that no one in the media wants to discuss the two very conflicting points.
– The tax is to force emission reductions
– The tax is expected to raise huge amounts of money
This is not just a ‘carbon tax’ problem, it comes up whenever there is some money grab hidden as important social reform. A few years back in Oz the then ‘Left’ government discovered that there was a loop hole that allowed Ready to Drink (RTD) cans of alcohol (your Jacks and Cola type pre mixed cans) paid less tax. “OH NO!” they cried. “This will encourage binge drinking, esp with young women!” and suddenly for the good of public health this loophole was closed and it was good because it would reduce binge drinking… and also raise huge amounts of money.
Nope. Sorry. If the tax actually worked in stopping consumers buying these products then it would raise sod all money. Anything else is a lie.
It’s like any “sin” tax (alcohol, tobacco, etc) the money coming in depends on people partaking of the “sin” being taxed. And make no mistake, the government wants as many $$$ coming in as they can get (and spend). So taxing to reduce behavior is a lie. Any behavior reduction that might occur is a mere side-effect to the real purpose which is to raise revenue.
I posted almost the same, elsewhere on this site. But it’s relevant here too. In Washington state (USA) many classes (rich and poor) have fossil-fuel vehicles. I have lived in the state six decades. THE ATLANTIC: “Will Washington State Voters Make History on Climate Change? The state could be the first in the union to adopt a carbon price by ballot” published AUGUST 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/…/washington-state…/567523/
This November, voters in Washington State may do what no group of people—IN OR OUTSIDE the United States—has done before.They will vote on whether to adopt a carbon fee, an aggressive policy to combat climate change that charges polluters for the right to emit carbon dioxide and other potent greenhouse gases.Their decision will reverberate far beyond the Olympic Peninsula. If the measure passes, Washington will make history, becoming not only the first state in the union to adopt a type of policy called a carbon tax—but also the first government anywhere to do so by ballot referendum.”
MY COMMENT ON OUTCOME OF FAILURE OF INITIATIVE 1631 IN MY STATE: MOST of our Washington State Government won’t stop trying every way possible (with mass propaganda using Environmental Elite=clean energy angel investors money for ad-campaigns ) to pass[ a.] Ballot Initiative (ONE MENTIONED ABOVE failed in November election) OR {b} STATE LEGISLATION. [c.} An unconstitutional Executive Rule-making called the “Clean Air Rule” (was thrown out in state court in 2017). State policy-makers and CO2 environmental activists want to create an “eco-tax” here, one way or another. When the buck-stops-here, in citizen’s wallets, they may react as the middle-class with cars did in France over the French “ECO-TAX”. WASHINGTON STATE SUMMARY: In 2016, the voters of the state of Washington voted on a carbon tax, Initiative 732. It secured only 41 percent of the vote. This was a “revenue neutral” tax, meaning the revenue raised by the carbon tax would be returned to citizens in the form of reductions in other taxes. This approach could appeal to conservatives who worry that a carbon tax might become a pretext for new taxation and a larger government. I-732 sought to build a bipartisan coalition by attracting the pro-environment conservative vote. But it failed to draw in sufficient numbers of conservative voters and, at the same time, lost a sizable liberal vote, given the intense opposition from mainstream environmental and social justice groups…
In reaction, Governor Inslee had his Department of Ecology write a “Clean Air Rule” and try adopt it by publication in the State Register, which “Rule” was quickly challenged in court (state) and found unconstitutional..
Then next the Governor used mainstream environmental, labor and social justice as his proxies to propose a revised version of the prior carbon tax, the new one being Initiative 1631. This would generated roughly a billion dollars of new revenue, which would then be used to fund new projects (the vagueness of how those would be chosen was ASTOUNDING< crony capitalism screamed all over the opaqueness of the lengthy Initiative 1631 small-print). Allegedly, the $$ would be used to mitigate climate change, such as mass transit and renewable energy, along with assistance to poor communities hurt by increased energy costs. Gov. Jay Inslee VERY actively campaigned for the Initiative.His big political supporters are clean energy & green technology investors and "ECO" Foundations, unsurprisingly.