The Washington Post ran a piece yesterday breaking the seal on establishment (outside of Gore) discussion about the dreaded T-word…tax, as in carbon tax. They note the Clinton effort to adopt a Btu tax in 1993, a debacle that led Al Gore recently to attribute the Democrats’ loss of Congress the next year in part to this. This is worth remembering, as any tax honestly seeking to now pursue the climate change agenda, instead of simply picking up where the energy-tax ideologues left off when defeated in ‘93, would be on a much grander scale, as (I believe) would the subsequent political defeat.

Regardless, not all was kosher with the WaPo treatment of the issue, as noted in the following letter sent to the editor this morning which, if our mutual history is any guide, will never grace the eyes of any readers outside of Planet Gore. Despite providing fans of cap-and-trade generally and Europe’s specific experiment with such a scheme, a forum to tout its wonders, they fail to provide the reader any sense of the reality of such claims, which do not survive scrutiny:

To the Editors, In a piece dedicated to the merits of a trading scheme for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, one which included intimations of a “guarantee the emissions will go down” under such a regime (Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense) and outright assertions that Europe’s attempt at this “is functioning very well” (EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas), the dog-that-didn’t-bark was The Post offering no assessment of the real-world evidence about such premises’ validity. (“Tax on carbon Emissions Gains Support”, Sunday 1st April 2007, p. A5). This is particularly odd given that the piece ran merely two days after publication of 2006 emission figures for most of Europe, which demonstrated that emissions continue to rise in countries covered by this program. According to figures published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and International Energy Agency, EU carbon dioxide emissions have risen at a rate twice as fast as those in the U.S. since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed (1997), and the performance gap is widening. This is despite Europe’s “cap-and-trade” scheme coming on top of energy taxes massively higher than those anywhere in the U.S. In truth, since Kyoto was agreed emissions continue to rise everywhere, including even more rapidly in Europe in subsequent years than before the treaty despite routinely boastful rhetoric to the contrary.