OPINION:
Last week I testified before Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Committee on Environment and Public Works on the issue of energy and climate change. This was Ms. Boxer’s swan song as chairwoman of the committee (thank God), so she predictably stacked the deck with a gang of climate change alarmists.
During the questioning, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, asked me if I would support a carbon tax, as my friend Arthur Laffer does, if it were paired with tax reductions to promote growth.
My reply was that “If the deal were well-constructed, it’s something there might be bipartisan agreement on” but that any such deal would require reductions or elimination of income taxes on work and capital investment.
Imagine my surprise the next day when the senator issued a press release saying that I “couldn’t dispute” the assertion that a carbon tax is a “net win for the economy.”
This is hardly my view, so let’s set the record straight. If Mr. Whitehouse is willing to accept a flat tax on income of say 17 or 18 percent that ends the double tax on saving and investment, then we can talk about a carbon tax. This could be the making of the deal of the century. Liberals get what they want to save the planet. Conservatives get what we want to save the American economy.
I doubt this is what Ms. Boxer or Mr. Whitehouse have in mind with their carbon tax scheme. Democrats want a carbon tax to stop fossil fuel production and to raise money for green energy projects like Solyndra. That’s a lose-lose for the economy.
The central point of my testimony was that the left’s infatuation with climate change, carbon taxes, cap and trade, Environmental Protection Agency regulations on power plants and so on would do severe damage to the economy.
These taxes would come at a time when shale oil and gas production is lowering gas prices at the pump, reducing American reliance on foreign oil, and producing more jobs on net than all other industries combined from 2009 to 2013.
I told the senators that if you turn off fossil fuel development in America, you turn off the lights on the U.S. economy — literally and figuratively.
Green energy alternatives, meanwhile, have produced a big green flop. Even Google recently acknowledged that its quest to make wind and solar power a lower cost alternative to that produced from coal won’t work. According to two of the Google lead scientists: At the start of the Google green energy project, “we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope.” Senate Democrats apparently never got the memo.
I closed by telling the Senate that to keep the economy growing, they must “resist regulations, mandates, and treaties that would jeopardize this treasure chest of domestic energy resources.” After all, the American voters made it clear in the recent elections that they want jobs to be job No. 1 in America.
Environmental improvement to clean the air and water must be made in ways that won’t cripple our fossil fuels-driven economy. The top priority now must be to accelerate economic growth and raise incomes. A new carbon tax at a time when the economy is in the midst of the slowest recovery since the Great Depression would reduce growth and impose a regressive tax on the poor and middle class — the very groups that have suffered the most in recent years. How can so-called “progressives” such the Senate’s Barbara Boxer and Sheldon Whitehouse support that?
• Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.
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