Carbon Tax

I really liked Thomas Friedman's Column in the paper last week . His column is about how a tax on gasoline would be a really good thing and how it will never happen because it is politically untenable. I wrote something along the same lines not too long ago, or at least I thought I did. Of course I cannot find it now. In the final paragraph he takes his logic one more dismal step to an unhappy conclusion. The world is facing some very big problems these days, as usual, and a tax on fossil fuels might help alleviate some of them. A tax of a dollar a gallon on gasoline could provide the US government with enough income that they could dispense with the income tax entirely. It would discourage people from using gasoline, at least a little bit, or maybe not, since they would now have more money to spend due to the elimination of the income tax. Anyway, if they did buy less gasoline, it would mean we would be buying less oil from the Middle East, which would mean that we would not be sending quite as much money over there. Less money might mean less to fight about, though with the tribal mindset, money might not make any difference. With a tax on coal and natural gas, the price of electricity and steel would go up, which would encourage people to use less. To help poor people we could give everyone a certain ration of electricity, so many kilowatt hours a month, that would not be taxed, but beyond that the tax would apply. Places like aluminum smelters would cry foul, but wait, they don't use coal for electricity now, it's too expensive. If we can reduce the use of fossil fuels, we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that we are pumping into the atmosphere, and reduce the effect of global warming. There are, however, any number of other sources of CO2 and methane that may be a bigger factor than CO2. There are big, uncontrolled coal mine fires in China and the United States. There are millions of cattle producing methane. There are bacteria growing on rice plants in paddies all across Southeast Asia that are producing one of these gases. Seems like every time I turn around I am running into a new source of greenhouse gases. Nowhere have I seen any kind of information on the relative impact of these various sources.