emission rights

[kandrathe]

I would transfer the federal fuels tax to be a petroleum import tariff.

Most of what you've said seems sensible, given your goals, although the devil is no doubt in the details.

However, this one has me stumped. What is the purpose of this? If I had to guess what this would do, I would say: deplete American oil reserves faster, and transfer wealth from American exporters to domestic oil producers.

And, assuming it was revenue neutral, that's just about it. I wouldn't want either of those things - and I can't see why you would either, especially given the "no harm" principle.

More details... The federal tax is was partly a way to generate revenue for roads and budgets, but recently (Bush I, Clinton) it also was conceived of as a "sin tax" to coerce transportation to be more efficient. I believe that, yes, the US should use its own resources, rather than fight wars to keep foreign prices low. My general principle of government spending is; Whatever you tax, you tend to get less of, and whatever you subsidize you tend to get more of.

And... the rest of the story... I generally oppose market interventions, but "energy" is so crucial to economic growth and stability that it must be guided toward that future (stable, and abundant). What I outline below is meant to discourage increasing fossil fuels generation, and encourage the transition to alternatives.

Here is my 50 year plan.

When it comes to energy, I would remove all fees and taxes on electricity. The price of electricity needs to be well below that of fossil fuels. Currently electricity costs about 10 cents per KWH, coal costs about 1 cent per KWH, and oil ($70/barrel) costs about 5 cents per KWH. This means we need to increase the electrical generation capacity of the US by about 7 times to break even with current consumption, and aiming for 15-20 times over the next 50 years would ensure keeping up with growth.

To prevent an explosion of coal use, I would limit their emissions to present levels (and reduce to near zero over 20 years), and encourage innovations to sequester all emissions. So, don't limit the consumption of coal, but eliminate the ability to dump the byproducts of its consumption into the environment. Coal fired generation is by far the most deadly environmental contaminant (even ignoring GHG).

So, I would reform and streamline the entire process of using nuclear fuels, from mining to reprocessing and containment of their byproducts. This is not a long term solution, but it has the capability of getting large generation facilities in place quickly to offset reductions in fossil fuel consumption. I would see this as a 30 to 50 year program before the plants might be decommissioned and enough renewable sources have been built to offset them.

For the very long time, we need to underwrite and promote the production of numerous smaller scale wind and solar generation sites, as well as the additional power lines needed to get the power to consumers.