“A vote for me is a vote for a carbon tax!”
We rarely venture beyond our borders PeakNation™ (why would we when we have a state as beautiful as Colorado?), but this international story caught our attention. Over in Australia, where they’ve had a carbon tax for the past couple of years, they did the almost impossible and repealed a bad law (taking note Hick? If your magazine ban is “unenforcable”…). As The Washington Times writes:
Australia is even more coal-dependent than America, using it for 75 percent of its energy needs (compared to 42 percent in America). But contrary to green expectations, the tax didn’t prompt companies to rush toward renewable sources, because they are far costlier.
Rather, utilities passed their costs to households — whose energy bills soared by 20 percent in the first year. Other industries that face hyper-competitive environment such as airlines suffered massive losses. (Virgin Australia alone reported about $25 million in losses in just six months.) The tax also made Australian exports globally uncompetitive, deepening the country’s recession. [the Peak’s emphasis]
With Colorado producing 64% of our energy from coal, we resemble Australia more than we do the average American state. This makes it even more preposterous that Sen. Mark Udall, a man elected to represent our best interests in the United States Senate, is cheering on President Obama’s unilateral power-grab to hike our energy rates.
What has to be even more frustrating for Coloradans, is Udall’s ability to tune-out every and all voices except those on the far Left. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as he’s lived almost exclusively in Boulder his entire time in Colorado; his wife, Maggie Fox, worked for Sierra Club for 20 years before working for Al Gore the past five years at Climate Reality Project ( before being unceremoniously dumped earlier this year when she couldn’t make the world temperatures rise fast enough); one of his biggest backers, Tom Steyer, is a man who has made a fortune off of Australian coal but now views it as the greatest evil (“Really Mr J. Daniels? You now believe alcohol to be the root of all evil?”).
Here’s how The Washington Free Beacon reported Udall’s support of the EPA’s attack on carbon:
Sen. Mark Udall (D., Colo.) called the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent, which could cost industry $50 billion a year to comply, a “good start.”
Clearly, Udall is not paying attention to the catastrophe that regulating carbon has been around the world. Even 400 Coloradans rallying against it couldn’t even get a peep from Udall. Oddly enough, the U.S. has far outpaced Europe and Australian when it comes to carbon reductions despite never regulating it. It’s not like Udall’s fellow Democrats are threatening the very reason for the carbon emission reduction…
In light of such contradicting evidence, we’d sure like to see Udall try to hem and haw his way of how he reconciles forcing a defacto carbon tax on Colorado, when Australia just axed there’s because it was so bad for their economy.