emission rights

[kandrathe]

If you want to kill the oil industry, raise the price of oil. Lowering the price of every other kind of energy is like trying to fly a plane by lowering the sky.

Lowering the sky happens all the time. Check out the incredibly low prices for technology for the past 40 years, fueled by competition and innovation. Roughly, nuclear power generation can be as low as 3 cents per KWH. There is room to lower the sky here.

Here's some back-of-the-envelope math on trying to undercut oil by making energy cheaper.

A KWh of energy costs about 12 cents. Each American uses about 14,000 of them a year, for a total of $1,680 per capita per year. There are 300,000,000 Americans. That's 504 billion dollars in energy costs. Want to shave off one measly cent per KWh, lowering the price by only 9%? That's a subsidy of 42 billion dollars a year. That gets damned expensive damned fast.

Its not a subsidy. Reduce the cost of generation by 50 billion, and pass the savings on to the consumer.

But, to just engage in taxing carbon without having alternatives would be homicidal. Like taking the junkie off smack cold turkey, where we'd probably just die, or at least many of us would.

The price of petrol in the UK is already over twice what it is in the US. No proposed carbon tax is that onerous.

But it is. As I understand it, your "Fuel Price Escalator" only applies to retail fuels at the pump. A *real* carbon tax would hit everything, like a VAT on steroids. Heating oil, manufacturing, chemicals, food, etc. This tax ripples through all goods and services, making them too expensive for people to purchase. The result is that they don't buy them, or buy much less. You already have a significant portion of the population in rebellion over the limited implementation of the FPE.

Yet, I don't hear of the mass deaths every year, not even up in Scotland where it's really cold. Must just be media bias, I guess.

Yet. Did you quadruple the price of fossil fuels used for home heating? It's 30% of your GHG emissions.