This is another in our "The Denver Post Embarrasses Itself" series. We only use that category when the Denver Post publishes really dumb articles or editorials.
Today's subject is the Denver Post Guest editorial "Global Warming Pollution Comes With a Price Tag."
Banks, investment firms, corporations and utilities have begun to price out carbon emissions at $20 per ton. Bank of America, the nation's second-largest bank, is the latest addition to this list. In a February speech, CEO Ken Lewis stated, "We need a stable and predictable regulatory environment with a bias toward clean energy and the green economy. When innovators and financial backers are confident of government support, risk calculations change and good things happen."
To help realize that stable market, he announced the bank's decision to price global warming pollution at $20 to $40 per ton in assessing risks for lending.
What this is really saying is that the banks, who are risk averse, are assuming that the legislatures and the Congress will be willing to wreck the economy by putting an unprecedented level of taxation on the generation of power. As lenders, they wouldn't care if the amount of the tax exceeded the value of certain businesses as long as they could identify and avoid those businesses.
Does this uncertainty already cost the economy huge amounts in additional interest payments as risk averse banks charge more for loans to industries whose very survival is threatened by government intervention and taxation?
Failing to recognize the future price tag of pollution will put Colorado at a marked disadvantage, making it more difficult for the state to meet the goals of the Climate Action Plan and leaving ordinary Coloradans to pick up the tab for significant increases in their utility bills.
With an added charge of just $30 per ton, the mid-range of what banks and businesses are already planning for, the cost of power for Coloradans would skyrocket. As a typical coal plant generates 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, this charge would add $111 million per year to the operating cost of a single plant. Multiply that by the 50 years that a typical plant will run and those additional costs run into the billions.
That's a big bill. Failing to plan for pricing of global warming pollution will force Coloradans to pay.
This is a giant income redistribution scheme. There are no pollution gods that a power plant owner must pay for emitting carbon dioxide. What is being said is that the environmentalists would like to impose a $111 million per year tax on each coal fired power plant and spend the money as it chose.
This writers, Kieth Hay and Johann Klaassen, never mention the word tax, and pretend that this charge is inevitable. It is only inevitable if we don't come to our senses. Here in Colorado we have limited protection against such outrageous taxing schemes. That protection is called TABOR. The reason that the protection is limited is that Bill Ritter has redesigned the Public Utilities Commission so that it can become a giant, unregulated taxing authority that circumvents TABOR.
We wrote about Democrat politician Sue Radford who wants to impose a Carbon Tax on Colorado citizens so big that 32 years after it started, it would be taking $100 billion out of the Colorado economy every year. It wouldn't stop there. 46 years after it started, it would be taking $400 billion.
Make no mistake. If Mark Udall gets elected to the US Senate, he will be pushing for a carbon tax. Like these authors, he won't call it a tax, but it will be designed to bring money into the Federal Government by the bucket loads.
In Colorado only the Denver Post could be so ignorant as to publish this kind of environmentalist trash with no thought to the underlying economics.
