Earth Equity News

House Bill for a Carbon Tax to Cut Emissions Faces a Steep Climb. By John M. Broder, NYTimes, March 6, 2009. ''Representative John B. Larson embarked again this week on his lonely quest to enact a national tax on carbon dioxide emissions. His idea is to set a modest price on a ton of emissions, gradually increasing it each year until the desired reduction in heat-trapping-gas pollution is achieved. Under the bill he introduced this week, virtually all the revenues from the tax would be returned to the public in lower payroll taxes. 'The American people want us to level with them,' Mr. Larson, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the House leadership, said in an interview. 'We create price certainty without any new bureaucracies or complicated auction schemes.' Many economists and academics, as well as a handful of Mr. Larson's colleagues on both sides of the aisle and perhaps a few White House officials, if secretly, agree that a carbon tax is a simpler and more effective means of tackling global warming than the complex cap-and-trade scheme embraced by the Obama administration and most Democratic leaders in Congress... But for a variety of political, environmental and economic reasons, a national carbon tax is probably going nowhere. ...