Surprise! GOP Carbon Tax Plan A Scam To Eliminate Liability, Destroy Authority To Regulate Carbon

[hatrack]

Beware of oil companies bearing gifts. Recently, the lobbyists and former Senators Trent Lott and John Breaux, backed by companies like Exxon Mobil and Shell, have been campaigning for a federal tax on carbon dioxide emissions. This would increase energy costs, but all revenue from the tax would be returned to the public. A family of four might receive a $2,000 check from the government every year. And we would all have an incentive to reduce our use of carbon-based fossil fuels in favor of clean energy.

Most environmentalists, including us, desperately want a meaningful tax on carbon. But several of the people involved in this proposal have shown little previous interest in climate change. The oil industry had few better friends than Mr. Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, and Mr. Breaux, a Democrat from Louisiana, when they were in office. So what is going on here?

Well, Mr. Lott and Mr. Breaux aren’t simply proposing a tax, but a deal: a carbon tax in exchange for two other things. First, they want “an outright repeal of the Clean Power Plan,” which allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions and which the Trump administration is moving to cancel. Second — and most consequentially — they want to give fossil fuel companies immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for damage they have done to the climate. As their proposal puts it, “Robust carbon taxes would also make possible an end to federal and state tort liability for emitters.”

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Moreover, fossil fuel companies have known for decades what their products have been doing to the climate. Internal Exxon memos from the 1980s, for example, warned that continued fossil fuel use could inflict “catastrophic” harm on much of the world’s population. A planning exercise conducted by Shell scientists in 1998 imagined a hurricane bearing an eerily prescient resemblance to Superstorm Sandy hitting the East Coast, after which a coalition of environmental organizations “brings a class-action suit against the U.S. government and fossil fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/opinion/carbon-tax-lott-breaux.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

[2naSalit]

1. K&R for exposure.