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CANDLELIGHTING

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THE JEWISH VIEW

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HOLIDAYS

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JUDAISM 101

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{weblog_name} - Maryland’s Global Warming Solutions Act
Comments (1)

The Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA; Senate Bill 309/House Bill 712), championed by Governor O’Malley, is now before our state legislature.  This legislation would put Maryland in the forefront of our national efforts to reduce global warming pollution by adopting state-wide, science-based greenhouse gas reduction targets of 25% by 2020 and 90% by 2050 below 2006 levels. While many of our delegates and state senators are supporting this bill, it is also attracting much opposition. The truth is, we have no choice but to reduce our emissions and to change our production and consumption habits. The only choice is how, when and with what positive or negative impacts.  We either will be able to develop controlled, affordable and just ways to change over our technologies and grow a green economy and marketplace, or we will slam into shortages, rising… read more

Readers should note the good intentions of the GWSA include a stalking horse for new taxes dressed us as a “fee.”  I am not sure why the revenue aspects of the proposed legislation have received scant attention. 

The act allows the state to establish greenhouse gas emission fees without any further legislation.

There are no metrics to link effects of these fees on the problem, of course, because, even if there were effects, there is no way to gage the impacts of a small state on the atmosphere of the entire world.

If these tax-and-spend politicians had the courage of their alleged convictions on global warming, they would take substantive action to begin to shift funds from nanny-state programs for services many people can, or should, provide for the themselves and increase funds to mass-transportation programs that only government can provide.  This would be but one change in policy priorities that can have a two-for-one bang-for-the-buck of providing needed services and while gaining self-evident benefits in emissions reductions.   

Of course there is none of this because there is no real conviction other than the conviction to inflict new taxes as the only way to fix any problem that they get us to believe in.

Environmentalists should be tipped off on how their cause is being co-opted by a government that has an insatiable appetite for taxes.