Issue Position: Energy

Issue Position

Energy and Pollution

Our national energy goals must be conservation (use less), efficiency (waste less), and diversification (greater and broader supply chain).

CHANGE
Everyone has a role
Government seeks diversity and security of source, conducts uneconomic basic research and publishes results, advocates markets and competition, and manages strategic and environmental risk
Business innovates and implements economically viable solutions, providing consumers information they need to make energy-efficient decisions
Consumers seek products that conserve scarce and strategic natural resources, changing consumption habits to reduce demand and ultimately reducing energy prices
Eliminate all energy subsidies to allow the market -- that is, consumers -- to diversify energy sources.
Establish effluent taxes to impose a cost on polluters, reduce pollution, and minimize its effect on health and the environment. "Ideally, one would like to tax bad things rather than good things, and pollution is a bad thing." "Free Exchange", The Economist, 6/2/2011

SOLUTION
Apply effluent taxes at producer, importer, and generation points.
Impose effluent taxes on polluting elements such as carbon, nitrate, and phosphate to move away from polluting fuels and activities. While other taxes -- income, revenue, or sales -- must be certain to be equitable, effluent taxes are avoidable by not participating in activities that pollute.
Use revenue from effluent taxes to buy proven and effective pollution containment services such as reforestation and public waterway cleanup. (Carbon capture and storage still needs to prove itself feasible.)
Invest in efficient technologies for existing public infrastructure that reduce energy use and pollution, such as smart power grids and next-generation air traffic control.
Fund basic research on stable, reliable, renewable, and non-polluting sources then publicize results so private industry can innovate.

BALANCE
The overall environment -- specifically air and water -- is not owned by an individual or group of individuals and, therefore, there is no market to establish a price for pollution (that is, a cost imposed on polluters).
Since the environment is essentially a public good, government should establish effluent tax rates to impose a cost on polluters.
As a corollary in water use, consumers need to pay the full price of delivering water whether for drinking or industrial and agricultural use.

Source