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“REVENUE NEUTRAL CARBON TAX” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2911-H2912 on March 3, 2009.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
REVENUE NEUTRAL CARBON TAX
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. INGLIS. Madam Speaker, the last couple of weeks I have been discussing opportunity and the danger that we confront with our energy insecurity. There is this enormous danger that was talked about over the last couple of weeks. There is also this incredible opportunity to create new jobs.
And to give you an idea of what that means in a district, the Fourth District of South Carolina, one of the six in South Carolina, has the wonderful fortune of having General Electric make gas turbines and wind turbines there. They have somewhere around 1,500 engineers and somewhere around 1,500 production employees, and at that facility they make wind turbines. They tell me that 1 percent of the world's electricity right now is made by the wind.
If it goes to 2 percent, it's $100 billion in sales. I am pretty excited about that because, presumably, a lot of that money would be attributed to the Greenville facility and jobs would be created there.
So the question is how do you get from here to there? By the way, Madam Speaker, the Department of Energy says that we can, in the United States, get to 20 percent of our electricity being made by the wind, and we consume 25 percent of the world's electricity. So it's a tremendous business opportunity.
So how do we get from here, the intention of having fuels of the future, to the reality of fuels of the future? Well, I think it's all about economics. It's all about whether there is a price signal and an internalizing of the externals associated with fossil fuels--and that's what I talked about last week here on the floor--is the need to internalize externals associated with some of our fossil fuels, especially coal in the case electricity; and in the case of the national security risk we are running with petroleum, the externalities associated with what comes out of our tail pipes and the national security risk associated with what we put in the gas tank.
So if you start attaching those externals to the price of the product, then some good things start happening and we start moving toward this incredible opportunity. So the opportunity at hand for us in a place like Greenville, South Carolina, is to create jobs by having a price signal sent through the marketplace that coal, for example, is no longer going to get the freebie that it has gotten. Right now, it's free good in the air. You can belch and burn all you want without any accountability for what's going up there.
That's a pretty good deal if you are the one belching and burning. But if you are the guy across the street who has got a better technology, a cleaner technology, a technology of the future, rather than of the past, then you are not going to take out that incumbent technology until a price signal is sent that could be sent by attaching the internals associated with the production of electricity by something like coal.
So what I am here to suggest, Madam Speaker, is that what we should be looking at is a revenue neutral carbon tax, revenue neutral in that you start with a tax reduction, reduce payroll taxes. In fact, I would like to eliminate them, but reducing payroll taxes is a first step.
Second step, apply a transparent tax to carbon. The result would be that no additional taxation would be coming to the U.S. government. The burden would not be greater on the American citizen, but we would send a price signal that would cause companies like General Electric to be able to see their way clear to make those wind turbines and electricity generators to buy those gas turbines because the freebie, the free good in the air, would no longer be going to the coal-fired plants.
So it's an incredible opportunity for us, Madam Speaker, that we begin this move towards fuels of the future. It starts with sound economics, conservative principles of accountability and of attaching externals to internalize the externals associated with some fossil fuels.
If we do that, Madam Speaker, the future is very bright in creating jobs in America. I am very excited about that and look forward to talking about it more with my colleagues as we go forward to figure out a way we can break this addiction to foreign oil and to power our lives in cleaner and job-producing ways.
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