Climate Change Legislation / Energy Tax

I really do not understand the opposition to legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other emissions in an effort to avoid potentially devastating climate change. The arguments against the legislation cite increased costs, the belief that global warming has not been conclusively proven to exist and the belief that any US legislation would not be effective unless other nations, especially India and China, adopted similar measures to curb emissions.

If global warming is in fact occurring, then the increased costs of curbing emissions now will be much less than the cost of dealing with the effects of global warming such as rising sea levels that will flood many major US cities, devastate food production and create more devastating weather patterns. Most of us pay each year for house insurance with little chance that we will ever experience an insured event such as a fire so perhaps we should look at any cost of climate legislation as an insurance policy. If your doctor told you that your son had a 50/50 chance of having a fatal disease, that there was a treatment that would probably cure the disease but that the cost of the treatment was expensive and that the treatment had to be administered before severe symptoms appeared, most parents would spend the money to ensure that their son lived. This is exactly the situation with the planet that climate change legislation is intended to address.

As far as US legislation not being effective if all other industrialized economies don't implement similar legislation, I think that this argument is primarily intended to avoid changes in energy policy entirely. Someone has to go first and if US legislation is delayed until there is a global agreement then it is likely that there will never be legislation enacted. It is not necessary that all countries agree, only that enough countries agree on a plan that will provide an incentive for those countries that are not part of the plan to modify their behavior. I think it likely that climate change legislation will quickly lead to reduced costs of meeting the lower emission standards and to more jobs for those countries who participate in the climate change effort.

One option for dealing with the issue of other countries not enacting legislation would be to impose an imported goods carbon tax in the form of a percentage of the value of the imported goods regardless of the type of good imported. The tax would be calculated for each country along the following lines:

1 - A core group of countries supporting climate change legislation would determine an emission quantity permitted based on total energy consumed. It should be fairly easy to determine a country's energy consumption based on imports and production (oil, natural gas, nuclear, etc.).
2 - The quantity of emissions permitted would be higher than emissions from hydroelectric but less than emissions from coal which would encourage a move to cleaner emissions.
3 - A cost for excess emissions would be established - call it a penalty.
4 - The cost for unit output would be calculated by dividing the country's total penalty charge by total GPD resulting in a penalty charge per $1 produced - call it a dirty energy tax rate. I realize that GPD is difficult to accurately calculate but a number that is close rather than perfectly accurate will suffice.
5 - This dirty energy tax rate will be charged by the importing country on all goods and services (no exceptions) imported from the country on which the penalty rate was assessed.
6 - The dirty energy tax proceeds will be used exclusively to reduce emissions in the importing country which will offset the excess emissions from the exporting country. Participating countries would need to agree not to reduce government expenditures below the level spent in some base year. Otherwise, the dirty energy taxes collected might lead to a reduction in what a country might otherwise spend for climate change from general tax revenues.
7 - The amount of permitted excess emissions produced would decline each year.

The use of this dirty energy tax would offset the increased costs that domestic producers incur to meet the more stringent emission standards, shift the source of imports from dirty energy countries to cleaner energy countries and promote research and development on better and cheaper methods of reducing emissions.

If we wait until all countries agree on a plan and/or until global warming is conclusively proven it will be too expensive or too late to correct the problem.