Real Gas Costs
June 11, 2015
The letter by Lloyd
Carter (June 7) bemoans the subsidization of fossil fuels as described by the
International Monetary Fund. This IMF working paper points out a glaring fault
of “market” economies. They simply discount the enormous cost of burning fossil
fuels as “externalities,” and ignore it.
Forget the suffering, grief, illness; tthe strictly
financial global cost of burning fossil fuel is more than $5 trillion per year.
That is the equivalent of about $3 per gallon of gasoline. The IMF paper
advocates taxing fossil fuels in order to account for their costs, strictly
because of existing economic realities.
That cost will increase dramatically into the future because
of heat-trapping gas emissions and the resulting climate change.
Most people throughout the world can not pay this $3 per
gallon. Rather than subsidizing fossil fuels directly or indirectly (by
ignoring their external costs), tax fossil fuels and then return all the
revenue of the tax directly back to the people.
Few would be foolish enough to waste their share of the
revenue on expensive, wasteful and polluting forms of energy. Most would seek
out better sources of energy and drive innovation in energy production and
conservation.
RAY WEST, PORTERVILLE
http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article23672173.html
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