July 9, 2017
Letters, Washington

Tax-and-dividend plan is a scheme

Walla Walla Union-Bulletin | July 9, 2017 | www.union-bulletin.com

The Bonneville Power Administration is responsible for power grid balancing in this area, and its figures show that hydroelectric generation is, at almost all times both day and night, greater than the area’s demand.

Effectively, we are getting 100 percent of our electricity from dams, and there is still some left over, which we are sending to (among other places) British Columbia, so that Citizen’s Climate Lobby (A genius plan on climate change, U-B June 28) can claim that other countries are successfully implementing a tax-and-dividend scheme.

The scheme apparently goes like this: Levy a tax on anybody who produces energy by burning fossil fuels (such as natural gas). So the producers have to raise prices to pay the tax. Call the tax money a “dividend” and give it to the people who use energy, so those consumers can afford to pay the higher price.

As time goes by, make the tax rate go higher, so consumers must demand higher dividends to buy more expensive energy, and the economy will grow because there will be more tax collectors.

Nobody will switch to wind energy because both science and common sense show that there isn’t any. Common sense says that windmills in this area cannot be producing any energy, since the typical wind isn’t even strong enough to blow your hat off.

Direct scientific analysis, taking wind speed times conversion factor times hours spent blowing, confirms this suspicion, that the amount of wind energy produced is not even enough to keep the windmills’ own lights glowing.

Citizen’s Climate Lobby insists that nobody has to give up anything, and the world will be saved from climate change, and we’ll all be drinkin’ that free bubble-up and eatin’ that rainbow stew.

Jim Thorn

Dayton

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2017/07/09/tax-and-dividend-plan-is-a-scheme/