Bureaucrats Seriously Discussing Use of Carbon Tax or Carbon Credit Trading Scheme to Control Emissions in the "Battle Against Global Warming"

Six years ago lawmakers, business leaders, and economists seriously discussed using a carbon tax or carbon credit trading scheme to control emissions in the "battle against global warming." The House in 2009 approved a bipartisan “cap and trade” bill designed to impose ceilings on industrial carbon emissions, while allowing utilities and other businesses to swap credits to meet their targets. But the bill authored by former Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts – now a senator – was defeated "among general fears about a faltering economy."

However, last month, in June 2015, Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii unveiled the American Opportunity Carbon Free Act, a bill that would impose a $45 per metric ton fee on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel. The proposed tax reflects the federal government’s latest estimate of the “social cost of carbon” – its measure of the alleged damage climate change causes to the environment, public health and the economy. With world leaders, environmentalists and even Pope Francis clamoring for tough action to "slow the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions," which the government claims to be a major factor in climate change, the idea of imposing a tax on industrial carbon emissions and pollutants is getting a fresh look.

Whitehouse and Schatz contend that their proposed tax – which would be increased by two percent per year – along with government credits for carbon sequestration, could cut U.S. emissions by at least 40 percent by 2025 – a reduction far greater than the 26 percent to 28 percent the United States has pledged to achieve through regulatory changes over the same period. Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) is promoting a similar version of a coal tax.

The Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution and other think tanks have begun promoting a carbon tax as a "vital component of comprehensive tax reform." While it’s unlikely that Congress will take on major tax reform until after the 2016 presidential election, proponents say they want to get an early start in building support for a "versatile tax that could generate tens of billions of dollars that could be used for an array of worthy causes."

“The resulting revenue could finance tax reductions, spending priorities or deficit reduction – policies that could offset the tax’s distributional and economic burden, improve the environment, or otherwise improve Americans’ well-being,” economist Donald Marron and researchers Eric Toder and Lydia Austin wrote in a new report for the Tax Policy Center.

Global warming is nothing but a hoax to enact a carbon tax. Move to the city...Right!!! Let's increase density so the elite can take the remaining rural properties, farms and pastures while the rest of mankind lives like sardines in a can. People need to wake up to the fact that central banks and their international corporations run almost the entire planet, that wars are waged to gain more money and control, and that ultimately the goal is a One World Government under a oligarchy where mankind will be no more than workhorses crammed together into a small footprint of land while the statists/elitists roam freely over the rest of it. We are like sheep being led to the slaughter.

Water vapor is the overwhelming greenhouse gas [it is 30 to 50 times more important than carbon dioxide (CO2)], and CO2 attributed to man is minuscule. Yet government-paid scientists claim HUMAN CO2 is the primary climate driver and must be eliminated to save the earth. Of course man is prideful enough to think he is a major player when in actuality man is an insignificant producer of CO2.

The greatest amount of CO2 is locked up in plants, rocks and the oceans. It should not be surprising that these each contribute more CO2 emissions than any other sources. This is a good thing, since there is a relatively stable and finite amount of both oxygen and carbon on this planet.

If it weren’t for carbon dioxide, the earth could well be a frozen ball in space, and life, as we know it, would probably not be able to survive.

The largest emitters of carbon dioxide are volcanic eruptions, forest and wild fires, and natural decomposition of plants and animals. Thankfully, ocean water has a great propensity for absorbing this gas, and ,as ice melts, it means that the oceans can take in a great deal more CO2.


1. The biggest source of CO2 emissions is volcanic eruptions. At any given time, according to agencies such as the USGS, there are about 13-17 volcanoes erupting somewhere on Earth.

2. Next in line for emissions is the natural decomposition of plant life.

3. The next biggest emitter of carbon dioxide is probably the ocean.

4. Other large emitters of carbon dioxide are forest and wild fires.

A person may wonder where man and animals fit into all of this. Animals and mankind breathe in oxygen and breath out CO2, and their bodies also contain CO2 and carbon, which is released when they die and decompose. Man burns fossil fuels, which release CO2 as a byproduct. Animals and mankind don’t produce nearly as much carbon dioxide as the major producers, with the possible exception of the death and decomposition of animals.

The instrument temperature records since 1850 or so (until satellite measures started in the 1970s) which are used to prove human-induced global warming (AGW) have been shown to be inaccurate, unreliable, and tainted by numerous errors. Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, suggests that since the IPCC climate models are now so far off from what is actually happening, that their projections for both this decade and century must be considered highly unreliable.

In a Geological Society of America abstract by Dr. Easterbrook, data showed we were in a global warming cycle from 1977 to 1998, at which time we entered into a new global cooling period that should last for the next three decades.

The Pacific Ocean has a warm temperature mode and a cool temperature mode, and in the past century has switched back and forth between these two modes every 25-30 years. This is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. In 1977 the Pacific abruptly shifted from its cool mode (where it had been since about 1945) into its warm mode, and this initiated global warming from 1977 to 1998. The PDO typically lasts 25-30 years and assures North America of cool, wetter climates during its cool phases and warmer, drier climates during its warm phases.

The establishment of the cool PDO in 1998, together with similar cooling of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), virtually assures several decades of global cooling and the end of the past 30-year warm phase.

It also means that the IPCC predictions of catastrophic global warming this century were highly inaccurate.

Furthermore, the Triple Crown of Cooling — cooling Pacific sea surface temperatures, extremely low solar activity, and increased volcanic eruptions — could converge to form a “perfect storm” of plummeting temperatures that send our planet into a long-term cool-down lasting 20 or 30 years or longer.

There are three big drops in solar activity in the 400 years of records. The first, in the 1600s, led to the Maunder Minimum, the coldest time in the last 400 years. The second in Napoleon’s time, led to the Dalton Minimum, the second coldest time in the last 400 years. The third started in 2004.

In May 2009 we exited Solar Cycle 23 and the longest solar minimum in 100 years: it was a continued stretch of weak solar activity that lasted 12.7 years, compared to the 11-year average (it was a historically inactive period in terms of sunspot numbers). During a grand minimum, the normal 11-year solar cycle is suppressed and the sun has virtually no sunspots for several decades.

The summer of 2013 should have seen a peak in the number of sunspots, but it didn't happen. The sun's activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. "Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment," Mike Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at Reading University, UK, told New Scientist in November 2013. "We estimate faster than at any time in the last 9300 years." Lockwood and his colleagues are reassessing the chances of this decline continuing over decades to become the first "grand solar minimum" for four centuries.

There have been 24 grand solar minima in the past 10,000 years. The current long-term decline in solar activity set in after the last grand solar maximum peaked in 1956, says Lockwood. The decline has accelerated recently, and the absence of sunspots has set alarm bells ringing. Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 percent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age, a period lasting centuries when several regions around the globe experienced unusual cooling. Tree ring studies suggest it cooled the northern hemisphere by up to 0.4 °C.

Solar sunspot activity peaked in April 2014 at an exceptionally low 81.9 spots/day, which means we could be facing a severe temperature decline through 2018 as Earth’s climate begins to respond to the drop-off in solar activity. Waning solar activity in 2015 will begin the long, inexorably journey toward solar minimum over the next half decade. If solar physicists are correct, solar activity could be very low for several decades to come.

Current solar activity is similar to the cold Dalton Minimum. There were three declining solar cycles leading into the Dalton Minimum, just like now. The third exceptionally weak cycle had a rare higher secondary peak than its first when the Dalton was reached, just like now. That cycle was followed by a decline to zero spots. The period of zero spots lasted nearly two years before another weak cycle began. The match to current activity isn’t exact, but it’s eerily similar. Sunspots are becoming harder to see and weaker. It looks like the next cycle, Cycle 25, will be another weak one, just like during the Dalton Minimum.

Less solar activity can slow the jet stream, triggering a suite of interlinked extreme weather events like the Russian heatwave of 2010 and the devastating floods in Pakistan that same year. So far, solar Cycle 24 has been most like Solar Cycles 10 to 15 which started in 1855 and ended in 1923. It is noteworthy that solar cycle 10 produced the famed Carrington event, which if it occurred today, would likely wreak havoc with our sensitive electric grid and electronics. 

A Carbon Tax to Combat Global Warming is Getting a Fresh Look [Excerpt]

Far more lives are impacted positively by coal than not.  It successfully powered this nation for well over 100 years. Funny how God provided coal for us to use and yet, as usual, man thinks he knows best.  The ultimate lie of the devil.  Environmentalists are the ones that destroy lives.

July 5, 2015

The Fiscal Times - Few thought that either cap and trade or a carbon tax would ever again see the light of day. That view is changing as the U.S. and other major industrial powers explore ways to meet their pledges ahead of an international global warming conference in Paris late this year.

The authors [of a new report for the Tax Policy Center] argue that finding a way to restrict carbon emissions of literally millions of businesses, consumers and government agencies through piecemeal federal and state regulatory measures will be difficult and needlessly costly under almost any circumstances. What’s more, direct regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency and other government entities does little to reward innovation beyond regulatory minimums, they say.

By contrast, pursuing market-based approaches that place a fixed price on carbon emissions “would allow the market to do what it does best: encourage consumers and businesses to reduce emissions at the lowest cost and provide an ongoing incentive for innovators to develop new ways to reduce carbon emissions,” the Tax Policy Center report declared.

Estimates vary on what the tax would raise. Marron’s study, which extrapolated 2013 projections of the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, predicts that a coal tax beginning at $25 per ton could generate about $90 billion in the first year and $1.2 trillion over the coming decade.

Yet moving a carbon tax from a white board to reality will be challenging. And the proposal is sure to draw strong opposition from utility and business leaders who have argued that a coal tax would hurt the economy and cost jobs. Moreover, critics warn of adverse distributional effects of a carbon tax, depending on how policy makers decide to deploy the revenue.

A carbon tax unquestionably would be regressive, meaning it would hit the lowest quintile of taxpayers much harder than it would harm wealthier Americans. As a rule, lower income households spend a much larger share of their disposable income on carbon-intensive products like gasoline, home heating oil and electricity. Unless Congress were to approve coal tax rebates or other forms of tax relief to compensate low and middle-income Americans for their higher fuel costs, a coal tax would pose an extreme hardship on them.  

That was a point made by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) in an interview earlier this year with the Madison State Journal. Ryan said he doesn’t like either cap and trade or a straight up carbon tax – even one that was rendered “revenue neutral” by providing rebates or other compensatory tax break to lower income people.

“I think these tax-and-spend ideas are the wrong way to go,” Ryan said. “They hurt economic growth. They’re very regressive. They hurt people who rely on disposable income solely — the poor. And they make our manufacturing industry much less competitive.”

Still, the tax has appeal among some conservatives. Jerry Taylor, a veteran energy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, formed a new organization earlier this year to encourage Republican lawmakers to support a sweeping set of taxes on carbon emissions, according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to Taylor, the carbon taxes would be part of a “grand bargain” between conservatives and liberal Democrats that would include corresponding cuts in other corporate taxes and the elimination of federal fuel standards and greenhouse gas emission regulations. Some might consider that idea far-fetched, but Taylor insisted it was plausible.

"You can be an absolute denialist [about climate change] and still embrace the logic of swapping out regulations for taxes,” he told the Journal.

Marron believes that a carbon tax in some form or another is a possibility in the future, although he cautioned that comprehensive tax reform “is a heavy lift.”

“It’s obviously not a 2015 issue or a 2016 issue,” he said in an interview last week. “There is a lot of work to be done to lay down a foundation, think through the issues and get the intellectual, conceptual and practical base so that when leaders are ready to entertain this as a serious notion, we have thought through the hard issues.”

Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity

June 14, 2011

SPACE.com - Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.

The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

"The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a news briefing today (June 14).

The studies looked at a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles.

"This is highly unusual and unexpected," Hill said. "But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."

Spots on the sun

Sunspots are temporary patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. These structures sometimes erupt into energetic solar storms that send streams of charged particles into space.
Since powerful charged particles from solar storms can occasionally wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field by knocking out power grids or disrupting satellites in orbit, a calmer solar cycle could have its advantages.

Astronomers study mysterious sunspots because their number and frequency act as indicators of the sun's activity, which ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle. Typically, a cycle takes roughly 5.5 years to move from a solar minimum, when there are few sunspots, to the solar maximum, during which sunspot activity is amplified.

Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle, Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots.

Hill is the lead author of one of the studies that used data from the Global Oscillation Network Group to look at characteristics of the solar interior. (The group includes six observing stations around the world.) The astronomers examined an east-west zonal wind flow inside the sun, called torsional oscillation. The latitude of this jet stream matches the new sunspot formation in each cycle, and models successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.

"We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now, but we see no sign of it," Hill said. "The flow for Cycle 25 should have appeared in 2008 or 2009. This leads us to believe that the next cycle will be very much delayed, with a minimum longer than the one we just went through."

Hill estimated that the start of Cycle 25 could be delayed to 2021 or 2022 and will be very weak, if it even happens at all.

The sun's magnetic field

In the second study, researchers tracked a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by the next solar cycle, magnetic fields erupting on the sun will be so weak that few, if any, sunspots will be formed.

With more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Matt Penn and William Livingston observed that the average magnetic field strength declined significantly during Cycle 23 and now into Cycle 24. Consequently, sunspot temperatures have risen, they observed.

If the trend continues, the sun's magnetic field strength will drop below a certain threshold and sunspots will largely disappear; the field no longer will be strong enough to overcome such convective forces on the solar surface.

In a separate study, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force's coronal research program at NSO's facility in New Mexico, examined the sun's corona and observed a slowdown of the magnetic activity's usual "rush to the poles."

"A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the sun," Altrock said. "Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the sun."

Altrock sifted through 40 years of observations from NSO's 16-inch (40 centimeters) coronagraphic telescope.

New solar activity typically emerges at a latitude of about 70 degrees at the start of the solar cycle, then moves toward the equator. The new magnetic field simultaneously pushes remnants of the past cycle as far as 85 degrees toward the poles. The current cycle, however, is showing some different behavior.

"Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we'll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all," Altrock said. "If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23's magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions. … No one knows what the sun will do in that case."

If the models prove accurate and the trends continue, the implications could be far-reaching.

"If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we'll see for a few decades," Hill said. "That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth's climate."

Related:

• Pope Francis is Stirring the Political Pot on Global Warming
• Obama’s Budget Boosts EPA to Fight Climate Change
• Despite Evidence, Global Warming Ranks Low on Americans’ Worry List 
• Rapid Geomagnetic Reversal Possibility: Confirmed
• United Nations 'Green Climate Fund,' Which Taxpayers of Developed Countries Are Forced to Fund, Goes Directly into Private Equity Funds of the Financial Elite to Create Climate Billionaires Like Gore and Obama — Poor People of Undeveloped Countries Will Never Reap the Benefit
• Maurice Strong - Strong has been a major architect of international policies embedded in the Kyoto Protocol, which sets up a for-profit Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a worldwide “carbon trading” market in buying and selling the right to emit carbon dioxide.  Hence, his participation as Founding Director of the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chinese Climate Exchange are extreme conflicts of interest. 

You can search Youtube for “Antony C. Sutton Wall Street” and read his books presenting clear evidence that the Soviet Union and Communism (and Nazism) were aided economically by Wall Street and America, by the big corporations. Also you can search Youtube for “Norman Dodd Ford Foundation” and listen to him explain what the Ford Foundation told him about the efforts to merge Soviet and American societies when the big foundations were challenged by Congress about why they were funding left-wing groups. And after the Berlin Wall came down (Bush announced communitarian New World Order), the same people created Agenda 21 – google “George Hunt UNCED Earth Summit 1992″ and you can find the video of the big bankers planning the carbon tax and wealth redistribution. - Alan, comment at FellowshipOfTheMinds



Maurice Strong was both Secretary General of the 1992 UNCED Rio Earth Summit and principle author of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 (Agenda for the 21st century) that was unveiled at the 1992 Earth Summit. Agenda 21 is a 3000-page, 40-chapter, “soft-law” policy adopted by 179 nations, including the United States, as a work plan to implement ‘Sustainable Development.’ Maurice Strong set the tone for the 1992 UNCED conference and the future when he stated: Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class -- involving high meat consumption and large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations. In other words, the globalists’ plan is to reduce the U.S. and other first world nations to the level of Third World nations. [Source]