They must be mad.
A little discussed offshoot of the economically unsustainable Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is so eager to join would throw private transportation as we know it into utter chaos.
As reported by Politico.com, Pennsylvania and 12 other northeastern and mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia have begun to explore something called the Transportation and Climate Initiative.
“Under a regional cap-and-trade plan” still being developed, “drivers would pay more at the pump through higher prices for gas and diesel,” the news outlet reports. “The revenue would be invested in mass transit, electric-vehicle charging and other transportation infrastructure.”
Translation: The cost of anything related to private transportation – commuting to work, driving for pleasure and the trucking of industrial and business goods – would skyrocket.
Government’s preferred transportation proclivities (to further subsidize the already heavily subsidized to cover up the lies of the failures of the past heavy subsidies to unsustainable transportation modes) would rule.
Continues Politico:
“The coalition … is hammering out a draft agreement to cap carbon emissions from gasoline and diesel, charging for the emissions and gradually lowering the limit over roughly a decade.
“The program is modeled on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which has reduced power emissions in the power sector for several of the states mulling the similar program for vehicles.”
Translation: This offshoot “initiative” wants to do to transportation what it wants to do to traditional power generation – increase costs that force businesses and industry to contract.
The bottom line for all of this is, as Allegheny Institute researchers Elizabeth Miller and Frank Gamrat wrote about RGGI (in Policy Brief Vol. 19, No. 37), a scheme that uses environmental concerns “as a pretext to gather support for taxation and government revenues.”
Many of the wondrous claims of RGGI already have been debunked.
As if RGGI isn’t bad enough, its putrid progeny, the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), pretty much has been flying under the radar. And a combination of these two latest attempts at command economics stands to do irreparable harm to the real marketplace and have very little, if any, net benefit to the environment.
But it is just such madness – the foundation of so much of the “progressive” public policy agenda — that permeates the ecocratic establishment’s molestation of fundamental economic reality.
The evidence is clear that RGGI would exact a cruel price on the American economy with detriments that stand to dwarf any benefits. Given that TCI is cut from the same stained, moth-eaten cloth, nothing different should be expected.
For nothing even remotely resembling sound public policy ever emanates from such perversion and madness.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
