Fail.

For the cartoon to have succeeded the "deficit" flames would have needed to be rendered as ghostlike or transparent...

... since the current deficit hysteria is purely a construction of, by and for the elites and has no rational basis during any recession, much less during this Great Recession.

Zap -

Fair enough. But if the "deficit" fire was named "debt" it might be closer. While the "debt" is not necessarily a fire either --- certainly not the short term debt --- the long term debt could be. And while none of it needs to be paid off now, as you correctly point out, it'll have to be at some point and a Pollution Tax would likely help out a lot in that regard!

Other than that, of course, point taken.

Well hey, like we say round here...KEEP THE COAL IN THE HOLE AND THE GAS IN YOUR ASS!

AND STOP CORPORATE WELFARE FOR OIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As a mother I'm concerned about the mess America is leaving for her sons and daughters, and I believe the rest of yous should be too.

As an American society, are we really going to be so shallow as to feign ignorance as to the damage the entire planet is experiencing? If so maybe I'll take my Picksburg pride else where, so these fuckers are fought well enough to stop them.

Obama stated years ago that his carbon tax plan would cause electricity rates to skyrocket. That won't hurt the power companies, the oil companies, or the wealthy. It will hurt the middle class and hurt badly the lower class and retirees. Will it reduce carbon emissions? Questionable, at least in the near term. It will give government more money to spend as Brad correctly stated to zapkitty.

As Mat Taibbi says the carbon tax is the next bubble, it will cut out the middle man and go straight to Wall Street.It does nothing to cut out pollution. If you think that tripling electricity rates is a good thing for absolutely nothing, it is your call.The wind farms level mountain tops and fill them with concrete, cut down trees and kill birds and bats. Educate yourselves. windaction.org/cohoctonwindwatch

Smart grid and wind, solar, biofuel (exxon is trying to own...through our colleges), geothermal, and tidal. Who the fuck needs dinosaurs? Time for federal and private investment to step up to the plate. American pie and baseball everyone?!?!?!?!?!!

Actually, Wingnut Steve, your electricity rates are going up anyway, since coal, natural gas and oil are all finite commodities that will inevitably rise in price over time --- and ratepayers are charged for upgrades/new nuclear power plants as well. Meanwhile, the cost of generating energy from infinite sources like solar & wind continues to fall, rivaling the cheap, subsidized cost of fossil fuels.

Most Americans are misinformed - all carbon tax proposals so far would REBATE part of the revenue to middle- and lower-income households. A price on carbon forces polluters to pay for their pollution. Right now, fossil fuel companies get to pollute for free and the taxpayer pays the pollution costs - a de facto taxpayer subsidy not enjoyed by any other type of business (restaurants, for example, must pay to haul away their waste).

Any rise in energy costs is far, far less expensive than the cost to future generations to adapt to a destabilized climate and rising sea levels. See Hurricane Sandy.

With all due respect Desi, I don't understand how an article regarding cost overruns at a nuclear power plant construction site can be used as a citation that carbon tax proposals would rebate revenues. Perhaps you cited the wrong story?

I agree that costs of electricity is increasing and many people already struggle to deal with that. Increasing it even more won't help those people who struggle already.

I merely state what the President himself stated, that the bills would skyrocket. I'm not sure what the definition of skyrocket is.....

Thanks, Steve - that was the wrong link, which I've now fixed in the comment, as well. Here's the correct one:

Help Henry Waxman write a new carbon-tax bill

My point was that 1) commodity energy prices are going up anyway (but will stabilize with infinite free sun & wind), and 2) any carbon tax revenue would be rebated to consumers to offset any cost increase. See the current carbon tax draft proposal from Congressional Democrats above, which includes a rebate to households to offset any cost increases. FYI, that rebate was also part of the 2009 cap & trade bill --- a fact most people don't know because the media didn't tell them.

Also, Obama was inaccurate when he said bills would "skyrocket" --- he said that before analyses of the 2009 bill showed that any increase would actually be about the cost of a postage stamp a day, not a trivial cost but it would have been offset by returning the revenue to lower- & middle-income households --- a similar idea to Alaska's Permanent Fund, which distributes revenues from the state's oil resource tax to in-state residents. We also know that industries consistently overstate the economic costs of requiring them to do the right thing.

Most people don't know they would come out ahead with a price on carbon: in stabilizing the climate impacts now coming down the pike, on the more immediate revenue they would receive from any carbon tax mitigating any rising fuel costs, diversification and choice in the energy they do pay for (and the option to become providers themselves) and finally requiring fossil fuel companies and other major polluters to pay the true cost of their product.

Right now, the system is rife with perverse economic incentives --- the most profitable companies in the world have every economic incentive to keep polluting for free, damaging the planet and our biosphere in the process, rather than investing in innovation or diversifying into clean energy.

And Molly, let's be clear: Matt Taibbi was talking about cap & trade, not a carbon tax , which is a different policy entirely. His article was about Goldman Sachs as a bubble-making machine, and he was making projections about the 2009 cap & trade bill as written at the time in his historical analysis of Goldman Sachs' machinations. Taibbi's concerns are valid, although a lot has changed since he wrote it in 2009. A carbon tax is a different from cap & trade, but like any policy it is also a ripe target for the corrupt in our corrupt system.

But the bottom line is even more important: cutting carbon emissions is not "for nothing", it's to ensure that human society will survive beyond this century. On our current trajectory of emissions, that is far from assured.

The math is inescapable, and really very simple. I hope you, as well, will take a few minutes to educate yourself on these non-trivial consequences.

Okay, I gotcha Desi and thanks.

Lets hope that if a carbon tax is ever approved it will help those in need and most importantly be used for R&D. If it just goes to the general fund I.e. more money for the pols to spend then call it what it is, just another tax scheme disguised as a penalty against polluters.

The figures I've seen for what a carbon tax will cost the average household range from $3900/year (GOP estimates), to $1500/year (CBO estimates from 2009), to the cost of a postage stamp. I suspect the costs are fairly close to what the CBO estimates.

Steve, it's true that a carbon tax would likely drive up the costs of using fossil fuels, even though the revenue would be returned to consumers. It's also true that electricity prices are going up anyway, regardless, but outcomes from using fossil fuels vs. clean energy are not the same.

Also, shifts in incentives to reflect the true cost of products are proven mechanisms to drive changes in behavior and use, like wasting less energy. For example, since the 1970s when California established tough new energy efficiency standards, manufacturers bitched, but clearly they had to be forced to innovate [you're welcome]. Even though CA has seen its population grow tremendously since then, our actual total electricity usage statewide has remained flat. And that has contributed to marked improvement in air quality, something that is difficult to put a price tag on.

FYI, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that cap & trade legislation would have had "a net economy-wide cost of about $175 per household per year by 2020" --- again, it's not the carbon tax, but it should be noted how extremely difficult it is to calculate such averages when we have such massive economic inequality in this country. [plus the GOP estimates were widely criticized by actual economists for their shoddy math]

But still there is that pesky bottom line --- scientists are screaming that we need to act to avoid much, much larger costs in the future. What price do you put on, say, Iowa as an agricultural region? Or the Navy's shipyards at sea level in VA?

I think it would be highly misleading to label carbon dioxide "pollution" in the commonly understood meaning. We exhale it, plants breath it. It is an essential part of the ecosystem and the survival of life on earth.

The concern is mostly focused on the secondary effect of co2, the warming effect. Fair enough, it could be a major problem, but no one REALLY knows all the variables involved in weather and long term temperature patterns. This is admitted even by consensus scientists.

On the other hand, if we are going to have a pollution tax, let us make it a real pollution tax. In fact, lets go ahead and make it an "externality" tax, i.e. a tax on every activity which produces costs which are not borne by the company or individual responsible for creating the external costs.

That way we aren't a bunch of retards taxing something that MIGHT have external costs (but which costs might also be mitigated by other variables of which we are not fully aware of their impact, like cosmic radiation), but then leaving companies free to produce mercury filled light bulbs (to save us from alleged man-made global warming) which if you break you better run and get a mask and gloves before cleaning up.

What about all the shit in our food that is toxic! You want to tax carbon but you are all OK with eating "pink slime" burgers, having an industrial pollutant in your toothpaste, with pesticides, chemical fertilizers and GMO crops tainting the natural world, with the vast majority of US rivers and lakes utterly poisoned, with the Pacific ocean fucked beyond repair by the Fukushima (continuing) fallout, with destroying the Gulf of Mexico with oil and corexit?

Seriously, there are probably a million environmental problems more dire than global warming. So why not clamor for an externality tax? Why not force a company to actually account for these costs, so that the price of the goods and services they are offering reflect these costs? I bet that if they did, many companies and entire industries would not be viable, and would disappear along with their externalities.

Further, any US company that causes as much damage as BP and Monsanto, the chemicals industry, the nuclear industry and the gas frackers among many more, should be liquidated, the top executives imprisoned for life and all their assets seized, with the money going to fix the problems these entities caused.

If the price of these industries is the destruction of the earth and the end of future human development, then we can do without these industries. These things will kill us all long before climate change.

Or if you are only worried about greenhouse gas emissions, why not ask our government to pay off every rancher and logger in the Amazon and every other natural forest. Just pay them not to cut down trees. In fact, they should be planting them instead. Pay people to plant trees everywhere. And we don't even need a carbon tax to make this happen. Just cut the military budget by 90%, keep tax rates the same, and we are good to go.

In any case, f we can find 16+ trillion to bail out zombie banks, then I'm sure we can find a couple more to reverse the death of the earth as much as possible.

BTW, the story on depleted uranium is what I'm talking about in #16 above. This is the stuff that will stick around forever, continue to accumulate and eventually kill all life on earth. Next to depleted uranium, co2 is a joke of a pollutant, and its secondary effects highly speculative in its long term consequences. The effects of radioactive substances on human health is not up for debate, unless you are a government and don't give a fuck, then you can just call it safe and it must be true.

Sam H., that fantasy world of yours populated with straw men must be nice, but here in the real world we use scientific data and reasoned arguments based in verifiable facts and reality.

Your comment reflects that you are not at all familiar with the work we do here. That's okay, of course, and I hope you feel better having gotten that, um, rant off your chest.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're genuinely under-informed and not a bought-and-paid-for troll...

We are not talking about the CO2 "in the commonly understood meaning" but the scientific & legal definition of C02 as a greenhouse gas pollutant. That's based on well-established basic physics, basic chemistry, a Supreme Court ruling, and a lot of data. As to the global scientific consensus, you've confused "uncertainty" with "doubt": there are many uncertainties in climate science, but there is no doubt that humans are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans.

Please first educate yourself on the actual global scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and the basics of the data underlying climate science and ocean acidification. A good place to start is SkepticalScience.com, where you can get clear, unbiased answers on what the science actually says --- and can actually read the primary scientific literature for yourself. Hopefully you will gain a better understanding of why actual scientists say our rapid release of gigatons of sequestered CO2 (fossil fuels) back into the atmosphere is not a joke and has serious short- and near-term consequences (Hurricane Sandy, sea level rise, etc.) and grave long-term consequences for human civilization.

Good for you that you understand the risks of depleted uranium and all the other negative impacts humans have had on every corner of our biosphere, including the public health impacts of polluting our air, water, soil and food. There is even more to the story, and it's vitally important that we come up with viable & workable solutions in solving these problems.

It's fine to be angry about the sorry state of the world, but if you have any substantive policy analysis or ideas to offer please do let us know.

Fair enough Desi. I'm a paid troll and you are right.

Climate change is going to kill us all. The Fukushima radiation won't completely poison the pacific ocean before acidification does. The Gulf of Mexico isn't already poisoned, and there aren't horrible mutations in sea life being discovered regularly.

Birth defects, miscarriages and infant mortality won't be rising while fertility rates fall. Cancer and other heretofore unseen syndromes won't continue to rise. We can continue to sell seafood from the Pacific and the Gulf because no one cares, Al Gore didn't make a video about it.

We don't need to actually shut down the most dangerous industries and jail the scientists and executives who were responsible for covering up the massive dangers of fracking, nuclear power and weapons use, oil drilling, pesticide and genetic contamination, thousands and thousands of novel chemical substances used with nary a study in millions of products worldwide. Nuclear contamination is certainly not the most pressing environmental issue we face today and in the future.

We don't need to even inform people of how close to complete environmental collapse we find ourselves. No, let's have a carbon tax with rebates for the middle class! That will save the world. I'm glad you are promoting that life saving policy. Unlike the completely nonsensical ideas I articulated, where we actually focus on the things and people that are directly killing us today and will eventually render earth uninhabitable if we can't find a way to reverse the trend.

And I guess the idea of an externality tax is a totally paid shill kind of thing to say. I mean every big industry out there definitely wants to actually pay for the cost of their environmentally destructive practices. And this idea certainly couldn't be construed as a "substantive policy analysis or idea." You got me, I have no substantive ideas, except those that I'm paid to have!

I'm also glad you are so informed about how co2 caused hurricane Sandy, because this article from the New York Times seems to indicate that there is actually no consensus on whether global warming will increase or decrease the occurrence of hurricanes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2...urricane-sandy.html?_r=0

Take a gander at the comments section on this part of the site you linked to and all those uninformed morons bringing up totally stupid paid shill kind of critiques or questions:

http://www.skepticalscie...an-natural-emissions.htm

These people don't all seem like crackpots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/...ssment_of_global_warming

And check out this fascinating and candid exchange:

http://www.independent.c...eeman-dyson-2224912.html

Now, that said, please go ahead and give me some similar links where a prominent scientist who is skeptical of the horrific effects of radioactive substances on life. An independent scientist, not affiliated with the government or industry, who says that the Fukushima disaster is nothing to worry about, or even that it shouldn't be the priority over all other environmental problems of our age.

You are obviously very intelligent and passionate Ms. Doyen. I applaud your fire and your efforts. I just wish they weren't being wasted on climate change when there are much more frightening realities out there that desperately need our attention, and need effective advocates like yourself.

That exchange perfectly exemplifies what is wrong with political discourse today. Desi, a seemingly pleasant person, when faced with the slightest inkling of possible disagreement with her opinion can't help herself but to personally attack Sam H. Who then responds in kind oozing sarcasm. And any hope of thoughtful discussion is *poof* gone. Is it any wonder nothing gets done in DC? They're all the same way, even worse.

BTw Desi, thank you for the clarifying information. Much appreciated.

Again, Sam H., it is clear you are completely unfamiliar with the work we do here.

Creating straw men to knock down is one way to argue for your positions, but it's kind of stupid since we've extensively covered every subject you've mentioned in your comments.

The only point on which I disagreed with you was your dismissal of climate change. The global scientific consensus projects that our current path of emissions will overtake all of the other valid concerns you mentioned, concerns that we have extensively covered. Ignoring physics doesn't make it go away.

Being an asshole about it detracts from your arguments, FYI. So do wild claims with no basis in science - Fukushima radiation is bad enough as it is without hyperbolic statements that it could "poison the entire Pacific" (got a link to support the math on that?). The same thing goes for your "externality tax" --- as written by you, your stated goal of destroying most companies and imprisoning their executives has exactly zero chance of occurring in our current political environment.

Hyperbole sounds good and feels good in an anonymous comment on a blog, I get that. But please be aware that shitting on people doesn't move the country any closer to any actual policy changes that might actually do something to address these myriad, intractable problems.

I never said you were a paid troll, in fact I said the opposite.

I never said climate change "caused" Hurricane Sandy. The short-term impacts of global warming are already apparent in more intense precipitation events and rising sea levels that intensified Sandy's storm surge.

But you're not interested in actually discussing anything, eh? Based on what you've chosen to say here, you seem to only care about being an asshole to people who don't exactly agree 100% with your exact opinions on everything. Good luck to you.

Sam H -

I must say I've never come across --- either here, or at any other site, for that matter --- a more passive aggressive commenter. If you believe that commenting tactic might win anybody over to your beliefs, however misinformed, let's just say your obnoxious tone is the opposite of persuasive.

Given your self-defeating tone and commentary here --- and the fact that Desi has already tried to speak reasonably to you (to little success) --- I'll not bother with responding to the bulk of your passive aggressive thoughts. For that matter, you lost me in the first sentence of your first comment, when you embarrassed yourself with the Rush Limbaugh/Fox "News" argument that Carbon Dioxide cannot be consider "pollution" because "we exhale it, plants breath it." etc.

I might remind you that water, too, is "an essential part of the ecosystem and the survival of life on earth," just as you dismissed CO2. However, if you feel too much water just can't be dangerous, might I suggest you fill the room you are sitting in right now with it up to the ceiling, and let us know how it poses no danger. Or, easier, just go ahead and drink 5 gallons of that delicious, pure, "essential part of the ecosystem" and, if you happen to wake up at the hospital, instead of show up at the morgue, you can write to send us the apology for your ignorance.

You offer other nonsense ("if you are only worried about greenhouse gas emissions, why not ask our government to pay off every rancher and logger in the Amazon and every other natural forest. Just pay them not to cut down trees." --- News flash: That is already being done!) before falling in to complete obnoxiousness and straw-mannery. But, again, given your passive-aggressiveness and frequent lack of self-awareness about being absolutely wrong, it seems either an exercise in futility, or just a plain waste of my time, to even bother rebutting your ass-hattery.

Steve, please read my first comment again and point out where I attack Sam H. personally.

Pointing out that someone is factually wrong --- because they are clearly unfamiliar with the work we do here, because they are clearly uninformed on the actual physics and chemistry of climate science, because they are clearly uninformed on the global scientific consensus and the projected catastrophic impacts, because they are clearly uninformed about current policy proposals and the difficult work that real activists are trying to do in moving mountains in a global shift of monumental proportions --- does not constitute a 'personal attack'.

Pointing out that Sam H. is acting like an asshole (in my second reply) might be considered a personal attack, I'll give you that, but my intent was not to personally attack him but to help him see how it seriously detracts from his arguments.

That said, I'll continue to try to help people who are uninformed about the science by pointing them to sources where they can educate themselves with unbiased scientific analysis (including comments that help to illuminate the uncertainties), even when they are unable to carry on a reasoned, thoughtful or civil discussion and are clearly not interested in an exchange of ideas.

Steve Snyder misrepresented @ 20:

when faced with the slightest inkling of possible disagreement with her opinion

Um, did you bother to actually READ Sam's comment? If so, your suggestion that it was "the slightest inkling of possible disagreement with her opinion" would be an extraordinary understatement.

In fact, Des was *way* more polite and patient with Sam's nonsense than I would have been. (That's just one of the reasons I didn't bother replying to him in the first place. After that second comment, though, and his dive into eternal irrelevance, I just couldn't help myself.)

"Fantasy world vs. Real world" is a very belittling comment. Whatever, I don't wish to argue and I'm sorry I even brought it up. Does the CBO estimates assume that the costs will for the most part be paid strictly by the companies and not passed on to the consumer? $175 per household per year only raises slightly under $20 billion per year assuming 115 million households. That's really kind of chump change in the grand scheme of things. I read through some of the HR 2454 report, talk about dry material...

She is WAY more polite than you, its quite refreshing!

Steve Snyder @ 25:

"Fantasy world vs. Real world" is a very belittling comment.

If one is using evidence from a "Fantasy world" (one which is not based on science, but on long ago debunked misinformation), why is it "belittling" to describe that as such?

Does the CBO estimates assume that the costs will for the most part be paid strictly by the companies and not passed on to the consumer?

I've got to get to today's Green News Report, so no time to get into the weeds on this right now either. But the short response to you is that the carbon taxes paid by companies (whether passed on to consumers or not) is to be rebated to those customers in just about every carbon tax plan I've ever seen proposed.

Beyond that, the always-wrong cries --- by EVERY industry --- that "It'll raise costs for consumers! It'll kill the industry! It'll end life as we know it!" are almost always proven wrong, every single time. (See same false historic cries on things raising minimum wage over the years, etc.)

Steve Snyder @ 26 said:

She is WAY more polite than you, its quite refreshing!

Yeah, I know. Fuck her.

I think you just violated one of your rules Brad, sorry to say that you're banned.

I apologize to all involved for acting like an asshole, though I must say I feel an inexplicable bit of pride being the most passive-aggressive asshole Brad has ever come across in comments anywhere. I suppose I would be more effective writing nonsensical satire.

Thank you to both Brad and Desi for your hard work. And most especially, thanks for actually allowing me to speak without censorship. I hope everything you are fighting for will come to pass, except for the carbon tax of course.

Thanks, Sam H.

Steve --- the CBO estimate on the 2009 cap & trade legislation was a grossly simplified number that attempted to squeeze total energy consumption in the U.S. into one average number for easier policy comparison, but the actual cost would not have been $175 per household. It was based on the assumption that polluters would pass on the carbon tax to consumers, and did not include any revenue rebate to households.

The actual economic impact of any new policy on individual households will vary wildly according to their energy use and any behavior changes individuals make in preparation for a price on carbon. (More wonkery here and here, that barely touches the volume of current academic analyses on potential carbon tax policies)

For example, Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers will see their energy bills rise by a much higher percentage than the average household in California (due to greater mandated energy efficiency, mild climate and wildly disparate income/consumption levels) or a resident of NYC who doesn't own a car and gets free heat from NYC's city-wide steam heat system.

The CBO estimates also do not take into account the economic activity and new jobs generated by forcing polluters to upgrade and innovate their operations, as shown by previous economic studies of new regulations to deal with air pollution and acid rain. The health care costs from fossil fuel air pollution alone are estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars a year worldwide.

Another 100% delusion from greentard fascists and SAG-SRM wx op denialists

You fuckers whine about pollution? You make me fucking SICK!

Um... okaaaaaay, "Blissful Ignorance." Thanks for letting us know how much we make you sick.