Your Questions About Green Living

What Israeli institutes are focusing on alternative energy research?

How high will gas prices have to go before the people get mad enough and force the oil companies?

to start seriously developing and instituting alternative energies?
How many wars for oil will the public accept?

It’s time for some clean energy. Let’s stop the tyranny of oil!?

I’m enrolling at Illinois Institute of Technology this fall as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Entrepreneurship.

I hope to change the world by finding an alternative energy so we can end the wars and tyranny of oil!

LETS CHANGE THE WORLD!
I hope to start my company, Collins Energy, after school.

I hope that by 2025, Collins Energy will be worth $13 US Trillion.
^^^^ JK

What do you think of this plan for energy independence?

First off, let me say that this plan is NOT about reducing CO2, although it may or may not accomplish that. It’s about using and importing less crude oil.

1. We institute a tax on all crude oil imported or pumped in this country. This tax to be gradually raised over time so oil always has a stable floor price. That floor price (to be determined) will be enough to discourage oil use and encourage development of alternative solutions.

2. This new oil tax is to be offset with tax cuts. It will be revenue neutral. To make sure the poor and working folks aren’t screwed, those tax cuts will be spread out in payroll tax cuts, lowest income tax brackets (including EIC), and Medicare Part D co-pays for the retired folks.

3. Government is not to pick any energy winners or subsidize any alternative energy solutions. Let the free market develop it and choose it, be it shale oil, solar, electric vehicles, natural gas, whatever. Any solution that is more economically viable than oil will be a winner!
To Ncsufan: To avoid hurting lower wage earners, we would be cutting the taxes that they most pay now, like payroll taxes (see #2). By raising taxes on oil, we are artificially creating the “need” for new alternatives.

Will we will have to pay more under O for:gas, utilities and every product we buy that has material energy?

George Stephanopolos did the nation a favor recently when he got O;’s budget director to admit that the cap-and-trade provision in current budget will increase energy prices for most Americans.

If it becomes law, this provision will have the government set a quota for total US greenhouse-gas emissions and then sell the ration cards to companies that emit them. IN ALL BUT NAME, THIS IS A TAX ON FOSSIL FUELS. It is projected to collect about $650 billion between 2012-2019.

According to the budget, revenues from the hidden climate tax will be split between $15 BILLION for alternative–energy-research subsides and about $52 BILLION per year to help pay for the “MAKING WORK PAY” tax cut/WELFARE check of $800 HUNDRED for $95% of all American workers.

Of course, the SAME PEOPLE receiving these checks ($800.00) will now PAY MORE FOR GAS, UTILITIES and EVERY PRODDUCT they buy that has material energy content. How much more?

According to Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the TYPICAL FAMILY SHOULD EXPECT TO PAY ABOUT $870.00 MORE A YEAR, almost exactly offsetting the check from the government.

So the net fiscal effect of the combined program of cap-and-trade and MAKING WORK PAY is for the fed government to take about $75 billion per year with one hand, cycle it though the government apparatus, and give most of it back through explicit checks to individuals with the other hand – with a mere $15 BILLION per year siphoned off to fund Son Of SynFuels.

Not to be crassly political, but it will also have the effect of transferring wealth from states that disproportionaly vote for Republicans to those that disproportionately vote for Democrates.

The Weekly Standard
National Review
March 16, 2009

Did we understand what we did, yet?