Re: AMD's well may be running dry

On Mar 17, 7:23 pm, "AEF" <spamsink2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
OK, then we're all addicted to air, food, and water.

And as such, have some level of energy requirements to support our
life, at some level of comfort.

Reductio ad absurdum? You've done that before with the "Well, why not
just get rid of gov't altogether?" comment. What you seem to fail to
understand, and Ted seems to, is that taxes are not a good method to
change behavior that the government thinks is "moral". Cigarette
taxes are an example of that. It's quite different than taxes which
are used to provide some public benefit, like schools, roads,
libraries. Taxes like you are proposing are more likely to cause
black market effects (much like France and Germanys underhanded deals
with the "Oil for Food" sanctions against Iraq).

Yes, there is the danger of black market effects. I'm still waiting
for you to propose a better solution. And the tax can be used to
reduce other taxes, and replace those being used to build schools and
such.

Just taxing fossil fuels does nothing. It may provide some reduction
of CO2 emissions, but with all the developing countries and just the
sheer number of people, there is still a lot of CO2 getting pumped
out. There still will be a lot of fossil few used. Foriegn countries
are unlikely to tax it, and if it's an international tax, you'll shift
some things to domestic fossil fuel usage. And of course the black
market effects by creating an artifical price increase. End result,
we're still going to be pumping out a lot of CO2.

It's naive to think that adding one tax will reduce another, or
removing a tax. The Spanish American War tax was repealed how long
after the war was over and paid for?

For a solution, you have to provide an economicly viable ALTERNATIVE
to fossil fuels. Our energy needs are unlikely to go down
substantially, and therefore neither will CO2 emissions unless
something else that can totally replace a fossil fuel option can be
identified. Taxes won't do this, since it's an artificial cost
increase that will ultimately likely benefit someone else other than
what's intended.

Solar cells? Better technology is happening. Wind turbines?
Environmentalists don't like it cause it kills birds, and you can't
put them in some places like MA since liberals don't like their view
from their mansions obscured with the windmills. Nuke plants? Tough
sell, and Not-In-My-back-Yard types make it difficult to build one.
Hydrogen? Need to free hydrogen from oxygen cheaper. Ethanol and
Biodiesel? Still CO2 producing, but who cares, since where did the
plant get the CO2 in the first place, right?

Your tax will likely hit those that can't afford it the most, benefits
those are the ones presumably to be "punished" via an artificial
transfer of wealth, result in an increased government to manage all
this mess, and at the end of the day will probably have little impact
on CO2 emissions.

When the price of gasoline doubled in 1973, and again in 1979, people
cut back on their use of gasoline. Economy cars started selling a lot.
People worked on improving efficiency. When the price came down (the
inflation-adjusted price), SUV's became the big sellers. Price works.

But those were real prices. Notice when the prices went back up,
people were lobbying Congress to do something about gas prices. I
don't think suggesting adding a tax would have been too well received
at the time. Even still, you don't provide an alternative fuel, so
all you do is make the fuel you have artificially more expensive. And
artificial costs introduce black markets. You don't see black market
counterfeit Timex watches, do you?

And as I said in an earlier post, a tax break can be given "to those
who are hurt by it the most", but not in proportion to their fuel
usage, or it would defeat the purpose.

But once you start the slippery slope of a tax break, you've already
defeated the purpose.

I don't think that this by itself will do anything to reduce use of
fossil fuels. It's pretty hard to compete with the price of untaxed
fossil fuels.

But the tax can also create a dependency on the fossil fuels, as
well. Say that you decide to use the tax for building schools. Now
education funding depends upon a certain level fossil fuel usage. The
government now has a disincentive to reducing fossil fuels, since they
need it to fund schools. Instead of creating a competition, you
inadvertantly create a dependency on what you proposed to want to
reduce.

I think the CO2 argument is a red herring, since other "green house"
gases are in abundance as well, yet aren't somehow "taxed" or of
concern, like water vapor, and methane from cow waste. Well, let me
take that back, California is thinking of taxing cow waste...

I was under the impression that CO2 is the main problem due to
quantity, but I don't know for sure. I welcome anyone knowledgable on
this to chime in.

That's because it's the new fad. Talking about Co2 emissions has
almost become a religion to some. They used to talk about us heading
into an Ice Age, well that didn't happen either. Water vapor is a
more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Which feels colder, a clear
winter night, or a cloudy winter night? Look at the high/low trends
in the winter depending on the cloud cover. Water vapor and clouds
hold in the heat. Cow flatulance (methane) is becoming considered a
green house gas, and some studies I've heard show it would account for
about the same global warming effect as all our cars (we have a lot of
cows in the US, too!). We're not going to start prohibiting beef
anytime soon, though.

And where did the carbon for all these fossil fuels come from in the
first place? Plants and animals that were living where? All this
carbon we're burning used to be in our environment and atomsphere long
before we dug it out of the ground. And where was all this global
warming controvery when the ice sheet over Canada disapeared and
dumped into the Atlantic via the St. Laurence River for instance? And
that was AFTER all this environmental carbon got trapped underground
for future fossil fuels, wasn't it? Things like that make me wonder
about the validity of the whole thing.

Now, I still think we need alternative fuels, but there are many other
reasons to be for it than the controversy about global warming.

.

Relevant Pages

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