An ecological value added tax (EVAT) to replace California state income taxes can be a useful way to make the market send accurate price signals on carbon and other pollutants.
The more polluting, the higher the E-VAT rate on goods and service. Price signals are sent to buyers. The more polluting, the lower your profit. The less polluting, the higher your profit. Economic growth can mean ecological improvement, not ecological destruction.
See my new book Markets, Democracy & Survival free on line at <www.rmaenergy.net.> for a federal l E-Vat eliminating all income taxes and instead taxing pollution, depletion, and ecological damage.
Roy Morrison
Director, Office for Sustainability SNHU
I assume there are benchmarks for various industries defining what levels of greenhouse gases are allowed. Who defines them and how are they determined? Let's assume Company A produces 30 (pick your own units) units of greenhouse gases against a benchmark of 50 units; it then has 20 units it can sell. If Company B has a benchmark of 60 units and produces 80 units in its operation; it now has to reduce its production of greenhouse gases to 60 units. The total production of greenhouse gases is 90 units for both companies. Company B now buys 20 credits from Company A so that both companies are in compliance. But the total production of greenhouse gases remains at 90 units. Pray tell me what has been accomplished? Company A has benefited by selling 20 units and Company B has been penalized in buying 20 units and the air is not cleaner.
Bill Dulude
A couple suggestions: May sound crazy, but may work as well.
1. Places where there is rail transportation available: Build mobile parking lots on the rails, so that commuters who must ride their cars over long distances within a city can ride the rails while sitting in their cars for an extended stretch of distance within the city. There should be only a few stations where they can roll off the platforms several miles in-between. Needless to say these should be built only on heavy traffic routes.
2. Encourage use of LNG/CNG for city buses, fleet vehicles, and even other gas/diesel guzzlers.
Jasbir Bhatia
Siemens Power Generation
Orlando, Florida
Please, if an international delegation to India comes, it will be an eye opener where the pollution control personnel from regulatory bodies of Govt are reportedly on permanent pay rolls of polluters. I am not revealing a secret! Leave aside the Nobel price to Pachuri's organization- it is not difficult to see the blatant twisting of laws. Only if you implement the laws as they are framed will save lot of carbon pollution!
Alok Misra
There are four big ways to impact climate change: energy efficiency, renewable generation, nuclear and coal-fired generation with carbon capture and sequestration. It will be difficult to eek out further energy efficiency reductions because California's per capita energy use is already lower than the rest of the country. California has already installed large amounts of wind turbines and solar. New nuclear plants are prohibited by California law. And there aren't any coal-fired power plants in California, so adding carbon capture and sequestration is not an option. And neither is displacing coal-fired generation in the state with gas-fired generation. California will do more in each of these areas, to be sure, but they will not be able to obtain as large a reduction as areas that have not already gone as far down these paths.
Thus, California will do what it has traditionally done: lead the country. California will likely lead the nation in the next level of emissions reduction steps that can be adopted around the nation and around the world. These steps will probably achieve smaller levels of emissions reductions, but many small steps can add up to significant emissions reductions.
A number of steps will be identified and tested in California. The most successful of these can then be implemented on a wider scale. One example from a draft Air Resources Board report was to provide electrical hook-ups at truck stops so that the truckers didn't have to run their engines to provide 'house power' to the cabs. California went a step further and realized they could also apply this idea to ships in their harbors.
Chris Neil
I have worked in the utility industry for over twenty years in the state of Pennsylvania. Many of those years were spent as a commercial/industrial account representative promoting energy efficient technologies and building practices. Many of the truly innovative technologies, industrial heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, ice storage systems, or more conventional energy saving technologies, lighting retrofits from metal Halide to T-8 or T-5 fixtures never make it off the drawing boards due to the two year or less pay back hurdle! It is time to dust off those old proposals that may clear the hurdle now, and benefit both American business and our way of life. Don't worry about the utility industry, they are a smart bunch and will adapt to legislative changes with technological advances and savvy lobbyists!
Scott Harford
J3 Energy Group
Your statement that the PUC has authority over all long-term contracts is only partially true. The PUC currently has such authority because there is a law prohibiting direct access by industrial customers. That law exists solely because of the power crises of 2001. When the power contracts expire, the direct access will be allowed again.
With direct access, the PUC's authority will be limited to regulated power sales to public utilities. Firstly, the state of California has no authority over air emissions from a power plant in another state. Conditions for the sale of power from one enterprise in one state to an industrial enterprise in another are purely a matter for the Federal Government, as case law has time and time again asserted. California will have to go back and attempt more legislation to fully re-regulate their industrial sector or get action at the Federal level.
On another note, the notion from the UC Berkeley study that other nations such as Mexico or India will join in the cause against Global Warming is just wishful thinking. In France, there is the case of a cement plant that could not stay in business because of Carbon caps. The company shut the plant down and built a facility to receive imported cement from Morocco. As a consequence, all of the carbon emissions got transferred to Morocco, a country not obligated to do anything under Kyoto, and the jobs associated with the manufacture of cement went there also. If anything, the carbon emissions are increased by the transport of cement from one country to another.
California utilities are buying power from Nevada Power, a utility that just recently completed a new coal-fired power plant. Nevada Power has a lot of gas-fired generating capacity, so what would sensible economics make them do? They sell the expensive gas-fired power to California, whose recently enacted standard would require that and let their Nevada customers enjoy the benefits of low-cost power from the new coal-fired plant. Nevadans are not going to be inspired by the actions of California, rather they will laugh at the Golden State as it pursues a policy direction consistent with the desires of Hollywood. If anything, such actions by the Golden State will end up reinforcing the earlier policies of George Bush, which were designed to avoid putting the American economy at a competitive disadvantage.
Effective climate action of the sort being envisioned now will only happen if all major economies in the world will sign something like the Kyoto Protocol. Al Gore got an Academy award and the Nobel Peace Prize but he did not climb to the summit that is coordinated global action.
George T. Santamaria, P.E.
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