Bloomberg Speaks on Energy Policy in Bali

Mayor Bloomberg is in Indonesia attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Amid criticizing the Bush Administration and Congress for failing to take action on climate change and calling for a carbon tax rather than a cap-and-trade scheme because they are vulnerable to corruption, he delivered this zinger directed at the current Presidential candidates:

I don’t see any of the presidential candidates on either side willing to stand up and say corn ethanol is not an intelligent energy policy. It may be a good agricultural policy to help farmers but it is a bad way to try to improve the environment because it does the reverse. I don’t see anyone from a coal state or an automobile state stand up and say, we should tax carbon or we should force manufacturers to reduce pollution.

If we’re really going to address our climate change and energy problems, we need a President like Mike Bloomberg who will stand up to the special interests.

One Response to “Bloomberg Speaks on Energy Policy in Bali”

Sam Says:
December 14th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Mike is absolutely right on this issue. We need to stop subsidizing the corn industry because it is one of the least efficient plants for making ethanol. We need to be promoting a range of renewable energy options, paid for by taxing negative activity like pollution. Mike understands that taxing negative activity is the most efficient way of getting it to stop, rather than setting arbitrary pollution caps. If he was really a saint, he would take this idea even further and say that we should tax only land values and untax buildings because wealth comes from owning land or other natural resources that should belong to everyone but are not. This was argued 125 years ago by Henry George for social equity reasons, but makes even more sense now because of environmental worries. We need an environmental tax shift now!!!