THE DEBATE OF OUR TIME: CARBON TAX ADVOCATE

Here is a summary of a lengthy, informative interview with a strong carbon tax advocate.

Carbon Tax Aims to Cut Greenhouse Gases
Ray Suarez interviewing Daniel Rosenblum, April 11, 2007 (PBS News Hour transcript)

WHO
PBS’ Ray Suarez interviews environmental attorney Daniel Rosenblum, cofounder of the Carbon Tax Center

WHAT
Rosenblum advocates taxation as the best measure to prevent CO2 emissions: “Everybody would pay it… It will be passed through to the ultimate customers, but it will be imposed at the top of the supply chain… We're talking about a $37-a-ton-of-carbon tax, which would equate to roughly 10 cents a gallon of gasoline or, averaged across the country, maybe .72 cents a kilowatt hour, less than a penny of kilowatt hour… gradually phased in…”

WHEN
“There is a more and more of a recognition that we have to do something to reduce carbon emissions…it's a whole lot easier to do a carbon tax than to do a cap-and-trade program, for example, internationally…you have to put a price on carbon…We're thinking of 4 percent the first year and going up from there.”

WHERE
This would be a national, federal tax.

WHY
- “There are costs society incurs when carbon is emitted. And nobody pays for it right now. Because it's free, nobody cares about it. So we put a price on carbon, and people start to use less. How? Electric generation. Electric generators will use less coal, more gas, more wind, more solar...”
- “As the economy grows, gasoline consumption grows…Under a carbon tax…going up, and up, and up, and up…There's no getting around it, so they're going to know they're going to have to respond to it…”
- “Cap-and-trade also has a price signal. It puts a price on carbon…under cap-and-trade, that money doesn't go back to the people who are paying it. It's going to go to the people in the market…But in a carbon tax, even though it has that "tax" word, the money actually goes back…Raise one tax, reduce another. You tax the bad, you tax pollution instead of productive work.”

QUOTES
“What we're talking about is called progressive tax shifting…So it will be a revenue-neutral tax, a tax, but individuals won't pay any more because of it. So it's actually not something that you can relate to as a normal tax…We're proposing that all the monies that are received from the carbon tax go back to all Americans, either by offsetting the payroll tax or through a rebate to all Americans…