Carbon Taxes Are Here (Even If You May Not Know It.)

Today I received a note under the door. It says there is going to be “a mandatory energy savings audit of the entire community.” The memo says this is “good news” because “the audit will take approximately less than 1 hour per unit and will be completed at NO COST to you.” It is not free. All Connecticut tax payers are paying for it. The money comes from the state mandated tax called the “Combined public benefit charge” on our electric bills. Based on the average electric bill for each person living in this community, that comes to about $72 a year. And I almost forgot the audit will also be replacing my shower head for a “low flow” model. I told the management I wanted no part of that. The audit will also replace my Thomas Edison model lights with compact fluorescent lamps. I told them I like my lights the way they are and to leave them alone. They said they would. Right now the audit is mandatory for the building as a whole but compliance by individuals is voluntary, at least for now.

And what is all of this about? To fight and stop global warming of course. The state is coming to my home to change my lights and my shower head (at no cost to me, right!) so they can protect me from global warming. Is this the first step? At what point will the state make these and other changes mandatory on a personal level? How many of my individual freedoms will be lost in the name of stopping global warming? In an episode of Seinfeld the building Jerry lived in was changing the shower heads to low flow. Kramer busted in and said “I don’t like the sound of that!” and neither do I.

Depending on what state you live in, you may be paying taxes on your energy bill to help stop global warming. That’s right, you may have been enlisted as a soldier in the war against climate change and you may not even know it! And as a soldier in this war, depending on your state’s policies you have no choice whether to fight or not. Left leaning politicians working as partners with environmental groups (corporations) around the nation have found ways to extract money from you to fund programs that encourage the development of absurdly expensive and ineffective renewable energy sources. The reason these hidden charges on utility bills exist is to move away from burning fossil fuels and transform our electric power generating infrastructure to a “greener” future, saving us from catastrophic global warming. I wonder how many millions of people around the country pay their utility bills each month and have no idea what they are funding?

High taxes are nothing new where I live. Based on the number of taxes and the rates we pay, it would appear we just can’t get enough of them. We currently are number three in local and state taxes. If you own a car in Connecticut you get a bill in the mail each year, they call it an excise tax. Our electrical rates are number two in the nation behind offshore Hawaii. On top of that we have one of the highest gas taxes in the nation. We even have a carbon tax to fight global warming. It’s true, on our electric bill each month there is a mandatory charge to fight global warming. Naturally it’s not called that but that’s exactly what it is. It’s disguised with fancy feel good wording like “Combined public benefit charge.” Gee, benefit, that sounds like a good thing! But what if I don’t believe in man-made global warming? What if I don’t want the “benefit”? Too bad you have to pay anyway. Don’t you understand little person? We are the state. We are here to protect you against dangerous global warming. We know what is best. Never mind that we are billions of dollars in debt and don’t know what to do about it. Never mind that we have unfunded retirement debt of billions in the future that we have no idea how we’re going to pay. We’ll just raise taxes and the problem will be fixed. Go away, there is nothing to see here.

According to the offices of the state treasurer and policy and management (mismanagement?) of the state of Connecticut, in the two years ending in 2009 the state of Connecticut was $948 million in the red. And it only starts there. For the current biennium (2010/11) the state had to deplete the $1.4 billion dollar budget reserve (rainy day) fund. They also had to spend $1.9 billion of federal stimulus money in addition to the $1.3 billion that will be raised in the current budget. And it’s still not enough. After all of that the state is still $500 million in the hole and that’s just for 2010!

In Connecticut utility rates are 37% above the national average. Now, supposedly to reduce carbon emissions we’re being forced to pay a tax to stop global warming. Even our “Republican” Governor signed a global warming bill in 2008. She said “By capping greenhouse gas emissions, we will reduce our carbon footprint, conserve energy and improve air quality in Connecticut while leading the way for the rest of the nation.” Improve air quality, what? Oh, you mean that dirty, deadly carbon dioxide. I wonder if the governor knows that carbon dioxide is essential for life on earth. Without this “pollution” in the air, all plant and animal life would die.

Here in Connecticut on everyone’s electric bill there is a line that says “Comb public benefit chrg**. This translates to, combined public benefit charge. The two ** are explained on the bill as “The combined public benefit charge represents a combination of three charges formerly known as Conservation and load management charge, Renewable energy and investment charge and Systems benefit charge. I love how they call it a “benefit”. I guess I should consider it a benefit that I’m being taxed so the state can save me from global warming. How ignorant of me not to appreciate this.

I have no choice but to pay this tax. In fact on the bill under the heading of “Delivery Services Detail”, there’s a total of six different charges that I have no control over. A full 44% of my bill is designated as mandatory payment. No matter how much I try and conserve energy, no matter how many low flow shower heads I install. No matter how many compact fluorescent light bulbs I screw in I still must pay these charges. The total revenue generated by the Public Benefit Charge portion, which is just one of the six charges, generates an estimated $172 million dollars. Of this total, $27 million is the Renewable Energy and Investment Charge.

The state of Connecticut website defines the Renewable Energy and Investment Charge like this: “This portion (of your bill) goes to the Renewable Energy Investment Fund, which promotes the growth, development and sale of renewable energy sources.” My question is: Why do we need the state to order the utilities to charge me to pay for renewable energy research and development? The answer is because the state of Connecticut believes global warming is a threat and we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to control global warming. Is the state not aware there has been no global warming in over a decade? More likely than not the answer is no, they don’t. Carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6% in the last ten years but no warming has occurred.

The sad part of this is that the state, in its eternal wisdom thinks that by reducing by some tiny insignificant fraction, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air we can control climate change. It’s as if they think the climate system of the earth is so simple it behaves like a thermostat on the wall. Just turn down the heat (reduce by some infinitesimally small fraction the amount of carbon dioxide in the air) and you control the climate, easy! Now shut up and pass the salt.

Today there are companies making solar and wind powered technologies and generating facilities but they don’t make money. The reason is because they are expensive and inefficient. Solar and wind power must be heavily subsidized by government money in order to exist. They don’t need to make real money, the government, insert you and me, pays them to be in business. Governments will order utilities to purchase the expensive energy these renewables produce with the cost being past on to the consumers. Get ready for another line on the utility bill.

After all that, these renewable energy sources don’t reduce carbon emissions. What! I thought that’s why we’re spending so much money on them? We’ve been told that wind power and solar energy will replace dirty fossil fuels and stop global warming. The truth is that traditional fossil fuel burning power sources must be brought on line to take up the slack when there is no sun or wind. The coldest temperatures happen when the wind is calm in the dead of the night. So the renewables don’t really reduce carbon emissions and in some cases actually increase them!

The key question is this: Is there a need for renewable energy sources? Probably in the distant future many decades from now, nobody really has the answers since we keep discovering new fossil fuel repositories. We will run out of oil someday but we have plenty of fossil fuel energy sources in the world to exploit right now. The problem is we’re not supposed to utilize them because, according to the state and its environmental partners it will cause cataclysmic global warming. The petroleum industry estimates world oil reserves at 1.33 trillion barrels. And that’s just oil. There are vast amounts of natural gas available. The United States has an estimated 2.6 trillion cubic feet of the stuff. And that’s just a tiny amount of the estimated 6,254 trillion cubic feet of natural gas underground world wide. Again we are told that burning these vast fuel reserves will cause man made global warming. We are supposed to gamble our economic future and national security on renewables that don’t work all the time and are much more expensive than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels make energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So called “renewables” produce energy in a highly variable manner and we can’t store energy.

Energy Tribune