TCI, the Transportation Climate Initiative, has taken some body blows of late. But it’s still upright and in need of a knockout punch. A good blow to the jaw, which this recent letter by the Heartland Institute may help deliver.
Related: Giving Unelected Bureaucrats the Power To Raise Your Taxes
It begins with this obvious but painful fact.
It is the opinion of The Heartland Institute that this program will penalize people, especially low-income individuals, for simply living their lives, all in the attempt to decrease global temperatures by an amount so miniscule as to be environmentally meaningless.
Translation: they want to punish poor people for nothing. A common theme for the C(lie)mate Cult.
The Paris Climate Accord redirected massive sums of other people’s money for negligible so-called environmental benefit. Trillions for nothing. TCI is no different. it is a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts low-income people and puts a drag on local economies, in exchange for a bit of virtue signaling and political resume padding or back-slapping. For nothing.
Even by your own admission, a fully-implemented TCI would only produce a 5 percent carbon dioxide reduction by 2032.[10] This is not a meaningful reduction. A temperature decline of less than a thousandth of a degree by 2100,
The letter also makes room to talk about RGGI as well. TCI is modeled on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative model. That means unelected bureaucrats raise your taxes for nothing. The impact of carbon trading schemes on economies is very real while their effect on “climate” is almost non-existent.
In a Cato Journal article released in 2018, David T. Stevenson of Delaware’s Caesar Rodney Institute writes there are “no added reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, or associated health benefits, from the RGGI program. RGGI emission reductions are consistent with national trend changes caused by new EPA power plant regulations and lower natural gas prices.
TCI is just another regressive tax set by people you neither elected nor can remove from office, which is not a bug but a feature for the left. The Laundered money goes from you through the unelected third party and into a state’s tax coffers. Once there it will get pilfered for whatever purpose suits the politicians spending it. In Massachusetts, they need it to patch potholes and fix bridges when what the Bay State needs is to fix its waste and spending.
Huge sums of money that will do more for “the environment” through the free market and local economies, if left in the hands of the people who need it most. Low and middle-class income families and small business owners. Entrepreneurs, and private investors.
If a society needs to fix something the free market will know if it is broken (or even worth fixing), and then compete to find the best way to do it at the lowest cost. Government’s incentives are diametrically opposed whether directly or as a financier of public-private partnerships.
Finally, we can’t talk about these ridiculous ideas without reminding everyone that nearly all the “emissions reductions” we’ve actually experienced in recent years (again, if you think that’s somehow relevant) are the result of increased natural gas production thanks to fracking.
Yes, CO2 emissions in the US are lower because of fracking.
And the same Democrats that want to tax you for nothing through unelected bureaucrats also want to end fracking. Because none of this is or ever was about the environment