Photo courtesy curran.kelleher.

In a terribly convenient way for him, Al Gore announced to the world that global warming not only existed but that there was a scientific consensus. For the sheep of the world, this must have sounded like the last call to do something - anything - before the glaciers and ice caps melted, the hurricanes hit and and seas covered the continents. Fortunately for those of us smart enough to question Al Gore and his global warming crowd, the glaciers haven’t melted (nor will they), the ice caps are either back to record levels or expanding, hurricanes are down significantly (now considered a side-effect of global warming) and there’s even sea-level drop in some areas. So what is the real reason behind the global warming hoax? Taxes!

Taxes are extremely important conduits of change on a large scale. Just think about the taxes you pay today. There’s federal and state income tax, sales tax, property taxes on your home and vehicle, vehicle inspection fees (yes, that’s a tax), capital gains tax, prepared foods tax, county taxes, city taxes, neighborhood association dues (another tax) and gasoline taxes. Earlier this year, Canada’s Finance Minister Carole Taylor discussed the introduction of carbon taxes to help with global warming. Initially the carbon taxes were to be tax-neutral, meaning that the tax could be offset by the reduction of some other existing tax. However, no plans were later discussed on how her carbon tax proposal would be offset. So what is a carbon tax anyway?

Wikipedia states that a carbon tax is a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Since you drive a car, fly commercially, buy beef, breathe or have children you’re part of the problem and not the solution. In an effort to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being spewed into Earth’s atmosphere, a carbon tax is enacted to curb unwanted behavior. Earlier this year, Michigan Congressman John Dingell (D) proposed a 50-cents per gallon tax on gasoline to curb use. Australia recently proposed a carbon tax of $5,000 per birth and $800 per child annually due to the carbon dioxide exhaled from the additional humans. There’s not much being said on where this additional revenue goes except that it’s used to curb behavior. It only seems fair that, instead of giving the governments of the world more money to spend, any new carbon taxes should be offset. A pseudo-system of carbon tax offsets has been introduced in the form of cap-and-trade systems.

Cap-and-trade systems work like this: each entity in the world, whether it be a person, an organization or anything else that emits carbon dioxide, is provided a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere. Each unit, usually in cubic tons, can be bought, sold or traded in a carbon market, if you will, which would be similar to a stock exchange. Companies and individuals that have excess carbon units could sell these carbon credits to others who are expected to exceed their carbon output. However, different people, and corporations, have different output caps in place, so each carbon unit could be different in size and hence traded on the carbon market and, as the year draws to a close, those carbon units could increase or decrease in value depending on carbon dioxide output for the year. While this may be reported in the media as a neutral tax, it’s far from being neutral. Suppose your favorite car manufacturer is XYZ Company and, because business is booming for them this year, they’ve decided to increase production 25%. However, due to the increased production, they will require more carbon units due to the increased carbon dioxide output from their factories. XYZ Company has to buy carbon credits from another company who plans to come in under their quota for the year - and those carbon units will come with a hefty fee because the originator wants to profit from their carbon-cutting measures. Since XYZ Company isn’t going to absorb the costs of carbon units, the cost is passed along to their customers in the form of higher cost automobiles. What if the company selling the carbon credits is ABC Company - another automobile manufacturer? You just paid more for a car from XYZ Company and didn’t get an offset, so to you the carbon tax wasn’t neutral.

The other type of tax that is especially prevalent today is the implicit tax of increasing food prices. A primary contributor to the increased cost of corn, soy and wheat is ethanol, a supposedly cleaner burning fuel also known as E85. The problem with E85 is that it’s food-based, meaning that corn, instead of going to your local supermarket, ends up in an ethanol production facility where it is converted to fuel. Why is that a problem? Farmers are now cutting production of soy and wheat and increasing corn harvests to meet demand. This increased demand means the farmer can charge more for his corn and, in turn, generate more profit. Wheat and soy are now in short supply and corn prices have risen sharply due to the whole ethanol boondoggle. The worst part is that farmers are typically subsidized by the federal government and ethanol, to be competitively priced, is subsidized by the federal government as well. By the time the E85 reaches your tank, part of your tax dollars have gone into paying the farmers for growing the corn, paying the producers of ethanol to keep the price competitive with traditional gasoline and paying the state and federal taxes on the ethanol you buy at the pump. The worst part about all of this is that ethanol isn’t even proven to help reduce carbon dioxide. In fact, there’s a case that it’s increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Just remember this: global warming isn’t about simple conservation of resources. It’s about using taxes to force a change in your lifestyle. From taxes on the births of children to gasoline taxes to the triple tax you pay to buy E85, you’re slowly being conditioned to accept all these new taxes whether implicit or explicit, to save the world from disasters that just aren’t happening as predicted.