EPA Pushes for a ‘Significant Increase’ in Carbon Emissions Tax
Meanwhile, a Bloomberg article describes that “Junk Carbon Offsets” are really what make big companies carbon neutral.
Considering that life on Earth is carbon-based and how much we rely on carbon-based plants, animals, and fuels for life, health, and prosperity, I have to give the global bureaucrats props for finding a target that is ensured to line their pockets and increasing their power.
Hard on the heels that the Biden administration is directing $1 billion to what is essentially a United Nations climate reparations fundis news that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pushing for an expensive new carbon tax.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a significant increase in the social cost of carbon emissions.
Policymakers use the social cost of carbon to calculate economic damages associated with a rise in greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Federal agencies under the Biden administration have been using a value of $51 per metric ton of CO2 – which in itself was a steep climb from the Trump administration’s $1 per metric ton.
Now the EPA is proposing to go even higher, at $190 per metric ton. Among other effects, raising this cost is likely to raise the prices at the gaspump.
The EPA suggested this new rate before a proposal from the Interagency Working Group (IWG) was recently issued.
The EPA made the new metric public before a highly anticipated proposal from the IWG, which includes the agency. The working group, which originally planned to release its proposal in April, streamlines the approach to calculating the metric across the federal government.
The administration’s use of the IWG’s interim social cost of greenhouse gases has been challenged in parallel lawsuits led by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, both Republicans.
It’s unclear whether the figures released by EPA reflect changes the working group is also considering. In the supplemental document, EPA noted that it was participating in the working group’s work and that the process is ongoing.
EPA spokesperson Taylor Gillespie told E&E News that “EPA’s draft technical report is among the many technical inputs available to the IWG as it continues its work.” She referred further questions to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which declined to comment.
EPA is requesting public comment on the estimate, which it made public when it released strengthened proposed methane standards for the oil and gas sector. The new social cost estimates were not used as part of the analysis of those methane standards, but they were included in a separate 137-page supplemental document dated September 2022.
In related news, Bloomberg recently published a detailed report on the large corporations and prestigious institutions greenwashing their image using “bogus” carbon credits.
Offsets are designed to allow companies to pay a small sum in exchange for removing carbon from their balance sheets. For years, researchers have been raising concerns that these transactions are letting polluters off the hook. Rather than actually reducing planet-heating emissions, they say, these offsets function like an accounting maneuver that allows more greenhouse gas to enter the atmosphere.
A Bloomberg Green analysis of more than 215,000 offset transactions in public datasets over the past decade reveals for the first time that dozens of global brands have followed in the footsteps of Credit Suisse. Airlines, online retailers, industrial firms and energy producers now rely heavily on the cheapest and most suspect type of offset — those tied to renewable-energy projects.
Most of these renewable-energy offset purchases are not credible, according to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at consultancy Carbon Direct and one of six researchers who reviewed the data. “I would consider these to be low-quality credits that did not avoid or reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” he said.
Purchasing credits tied to support of solar or wind projects sounds good for the climate. But experts consider these offsets largely bogus.
Looking at the data, one can only conclude that what the “carbon credit” dealers are actually selling are environmental indulgences to the companies complying with the narrative science behind climate crisis policies.
The social cost of the carbon emissions approach is no different.
Interestingly, climate reparations were discussed during my appearance today on Canto Talk.
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Comments
You’re just a cash cow the CCBUYden.
Congress sets laws and tax rates. The EPA is not in a position to advocate for things like that. Abolish it along with the CDC and DHS
The left simply doesn’t care.
They’ll impose the tax anyway and it will cost companies billions for years until the Supreme Court finally gets around to saying it was illegal.
And not a single person at the EPA will face consequences for doing it.
This is what the left does now.
Dear God yes
Inflation will not disappear until the restrictions on disappear.
Why don’t they tax illegals coming across the border? A $5,000 carbon tax on each head. Two and one half million people produce a lot of C02. Not to mention the zillions of tons of garbage scattered for hundreds of miles in every direction. Nor the gazillions of dollars of tax money burnt up providing for them.
Hmmm. We are up to what now, 5 million illegals since Biden became pResident?
At $5k per head, that’s about $25 trillion.
That could make a dent in the country’s financial woes.
That would be $25 Billion, which ain’t chump change but ain’t close to even one trillion.
One million? We have over 30 million illegals in this country and counting
Government greed knows no limit. Yet government and its well-paid employees are never called greedy.
They all made a sacrifice of lower pay and benefits for job security. Oh. Wait.
The sad part is that many of them do believe it. They have a hugely inflated sense of their value. The Bob’s would have a field day.
‘What is it that you would say that you do here?’
My father was a GS 12 or 13 for the GSA. When he began planning his retirement he began training a replacement. He gave up after the three people he trained immediately left government employment for a private job doing the same thing that paid more than twice as much.
I think my dad was overpaid, but he made far less than his private sector counterparts.
Voodoo science, voodoo economics.
Stolen elections have consequences.
Tax increases proposed after mid -term election? Purely coincidencal. Why bother, they knew who would win.
The born unPlanned Penalty.
CO2 is plant food. Not dangerous
The whole point of the is to return to the climate catastrophe scam is to return to a feudal Era when the peasants didn’t have they same rights as the nobility. They can jet around the world to climate conferences wining and dining on filet mignon and wild caught salmon. You peasants must eat bugs.
Sorry. Om commenting from my phone.
Another agency that thinks it’s a super-legislator. Defund it by 96%.
Good. Voting stupidly should be painful.
These credits have been a scam since their invention under Obama.
It’s so inviable that the amount of credits purchased means that solar and wind companies would be working off these credits for an eternity. Of course, that won’t ever be allowed and the credits will just go into govt waste because the companies wouldn’t be solvent if that were to happen.
Carbon credits are the false equivalency the left tries to apply to oil subsidies. The difference is that those industries can take a handout as a capital investment and use it to make more money. The scam wind and solar (particularly wind) companies can’t do that.
It is long past due for a significant reduction in the size of the Federal Government. Our republic works best when the the votes of the least among really count, when the voters get an effective say in the issues that affect them and perhaps most of all are more immune from Washington big money interests.
We need more fossil fuel production and far less regulation and taxes
Sooooo…. introducing complexity and artificial instruments leads to scams and fraud from people gaming the system.
This is my shocked face.
Methane is an irrelevant greenhouse gas outside of the laboratory and in the atmosphere because it only absorbs and retains Earth’s otherwise escaping long-wave energy in two very specific short radiation bands @ 3.3 & 7.5 microns of the electromagnetic spectrum, where that energy in those narrow bands is also absorbed by water vapor. Water vapor is 5000 to 10,000 times as prevalent in the atmosphere as methane and has long since saturated the energy absorption factor in those narrow spectral bands leaving virtually no energy for which methane can compete and certainly not enough to worry about increased levels of methane capturing. Stated another way, the only source for methane capture of energy in the atmosphere has long ago been exhausted by humidity. What it can do in the laboratory (25-84 times more energy absorbent than CO2) without competing gases absorbing IR radiation, it cannot do in the atmosphere because there is no energy left to capture in those bands in which it can only absorbs energy that might otherwise escape Earth into the void of outer space.
For the reasons stated, fear of methane affecting climate change is scientifically illusory and nonsense. Despite what you have heard and read methane has no discernible effect in the atmosphere on Earth’s temperature or climate.