Russ Steele
Patrick J. Michaels writes in the American Spectator, and on the Cato Institute web site. His recent article Carbon Copies raises an interesting question in my mind. Which legislature is smarter, Kansas or California?
The Kansas Legislature has wisely written a proposed tax on carbon dioxide emissions out of this year's energy legislation. That's the good news: As originally written by the Committee on Utilities, the Sunflower Energy bill's CO2 tax would have been a first, and a very bad precedent. The bad news is that the original bill will be copied and wind up before other legislatures that are more likely to pass it, like those of California and Oregon.
A CO2 tax will largely be levied on utilities that exceed modest limits on their carbon dioxide effluent, so consumers won't "see" it — except in their electric bills. They'll send in their monthly checks, quite unaware that the new tax revenues are likely to be shoved into a slush fund for solar energy, windmills, biodiesel, ethanol and other green gadgetry boondoggles.
Never mind that even the New York Times now acknowledges that biofuels add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the equivalent amount of conventional fuels, or that the diversion of a third of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production has driven world food prices up so much that we are now witnessing riots, including a major one in Jakarta last month.
And, today we learned about the power emergency in Texas when the wind stopped blowing, the windmills quit producing power, while the temperature was dropping creating a power emergency. As I wrote the other day, the Nevada Solar power plants were not operating due to high winds, rain and overcast. Now, who picks up the slack when the sun does not shine, the wind does not blow and California Carbon Taxes are going in to a slush fund for more ineffective solar and wind driven power. There is still time to act, tell our legislators we do not want a CO2 tax slush fund. We have enough coal for 500 years of power generation, reliable power no mater how cold is gets. We can build nuclear power plant to warm our houses during the coming cool down. Lets hope the new leaders in the Californian legislature prove top be a smart as those in Kansas.
