My opinion on carbon Cap and Trade and carbon taxes is that while Cap and Trade will do much to get us lower carbon emissions, it doesn’t have to be our only method.

From what I have read, if we didn’t have us Cap and Trade on sulfur and used taxes instead to lower sulfur emitted from power plants, it would have cost 40 percent more per ton. That is if it was taxes, for every 100 dollar cost for Cap and Trade, it would have cost 140 dollars for every ton of sulfur that wasn’t emitted from power plants. The important part of this is that even though it would have cost more for each ton of sulfur not emitted, the money taxed would have gone in a government general tax fund. Taxes in other things could have been decreased.

That’s why I’m for Tax Trade instead of Cap and Trade. Carbon based energy is much more a part of the economy than sulfur exhaust from power plants. The scale is so huge. Taxing carbon is huge also, but this has been done before, government taxes are a huge part of our economy, it’s just that if we trade taxes from property, sales and income taxes to fossil fuel carbon, we’ve just traded one form of taxing for another.

Tax carbon energy for manufacturers/producers at a world wide agreed upon rate in dollars per ton carbon. Level carbon energy costs for all manufacturers/producers around the world.

Tax carbon energy for consumers at a rate of GNP around the world. There can be an agreed upon consumption tax rate of, say 3 percent of GNP for each country to try to meet. Each countries consumption taxes would go into that countries tax general fund and allow that country to lower other consumption taxes on their own population. For a guide, state sales taxes are 3.2 percent of GNP and property taxes are 2.8 percent of GNP.

A carbon energy tax for consumers could also increase per decade, 3 percent of GNP in the 2020’s 5 percent in the 2030’s and 7 percent in the 2040’s of GNP as goals for each country in the world would go a long way in cutting fossil fuel carbon use. With a 7 percent of GNP fossil fuel carbon tax, the United States could eliminate each states sales taxes and half of property taxes and still reduce income taxes by 300 billion dollars a year.

Simply put, electric customers better brace themselves whether they like it or not, because prices will go up. There are too many contributing factors to price and the price increase has become inevitable. It’s very sad to write something like this, especially during a consumer crunch and $4/gasoline, however, that is the next shoe to drop.

Not so cheap anymore. The spot prices for coal are going way up, world-wide.

Maybe not so plentiful in a couple of decades, either. Go read about Peak Coal.