This column by Powerline suggests to me that there is a great way of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions; allow greater production of fossil fuels in the U.S. and enact a 10% revenue tariff. How does this work?
Simple. If you look at the graphs and do a little bit of arithmetic, you'll see that the Chinese release about 3x the greenhouse gases per dollar of GDP than does the United States, and a great part of this is because it's still profitable for them to use very inefficient ways of producing energy--and this is not entirely because of their dependence on coal, because using coal in itself only releases 70% more greenhouse gases than using natural gas.
Drilling in the U.S. reduces our own production costs, and that reduces any advantages that shoddy Chinese goods have over those domestically produced. More importantly, you've got the principle seen with the 1991 increase on wine taxes; all of a sudden, it became unprofitable to produce "bum wines" (and wine coolers), and the wine industry in the U.S. began to target wine for quality instead of quantity.
The same thing goes with other products, and I suspect that a lot of the factories that currently make shoddy products are among them. You can't keep fueling your factory with coal if you don't have sales to buy the coal, after all.
Looks like the solution for our future is....really....a lot of the policies of the past.
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