Pennsylvania Proposes a Carbon Tax

Plus, Schumer throws Israel under the bus; TikTok and Senator Cotton’s “racist discourse”

One of the unfortunate consequences of the collapse of the press that I wrote about earlier this week (“The Last Los Angeles Times Press Run”) is that instead of covering newsworthy developments with their own reporters and skeptical, independent editing, even the best and biggest of our newspapers now sometimes rely on wire-service accounts that act as propaganda for politicians.

Page A2 of this morning’s Wall Street Journal carries an Associated Press dispatch headlined “Governor Sets Plan to Lower Emissions.” It begins, “Gov. Josh Shapiro unveiled a plan to fight climate change Wednesday.” The word “tax” doesn’t appear anywhere in the six-paragraph article. Instead the article claims, “Under Shapiro’s plan, Pennsylvania would create its own stand-alone carbon-pricing program, with most of the money paid by polluting power plants. No one will pay more for electricity and many will pay less, Shapiro said.”

Compare that to a March 13 press release from the Commonwealth Foundation, a free-market-oriented, Pennsylvania-based research group. “Governor Shapiro’s Disastrous Carbon Tax Hurts Families, Breaks Promises,” the release’s headline says. “Shapiro is actively breaking his campaign promises to avoid tax increases.” The release goes on:

The governor is already attempting to unilaterally impose the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative [RGGI]—a program that would strip nearly $800 million from the private sector while raising electric bills by as much as 30 percent for households and businesses. Now, Shapiro wants to double down with an economy-wide carbon tax that will drive up costs on everything from groceries to gasoline.

“It’s a one-two punch of higher taxes that working families can ill afford as they struggle with battering inflation and soaring prices at the pump. Shapiro appears hellbent on making energy more expensive to appease his radical environmentalist base and pay homage to his progressive campaign donors instead of looking out for the best interests of taxpayers.

“Shapiro wants to turn Pennsylvania into the next California. He’s implementing the same economically destructive climate policies that have crippled the Golden State and caused gas at the pump to become practically a luxury good. His decision is economically backward for our commonwealth—and it’s a mistake we can’t afford.

Shapiro’s own press release euphemistically describes his plan as “generating $5.1 billion in investment in clean, reliable energy sources,” of which “70% of the revenue will be directed back to Pennsylvania residents as a rebate on their electric bill,” while the rest “will support projects…”

This $5.1 billion in “investment” isn’t going to magically appear from nowhere, and the “support projects” is a fancy way of saying “government spending.” The claim that the money will be “paid by polluting power plants,” is comical. “Power plants” don’t pay money; the shareholders of the companies that own them do, and the shareholders sometimes pass along the costs by charging customers more or paying workers less.

I’m not suggesting climate change isn’t worth trying to slow or counteract, or that protecting the environment and fighting pollution shouldn’t be priorities for politicians or public policy. But such policies, no matter how much they try to be win-win, inevitably involve tradeoffs, especially if taxes are involved. So it doesn’t do the public any favors to obscure the fact that taxes are involved, especially $5 billion in taxes. There are some Republicans who think some sort of revenue-neutral carbon tax, offset by a cut in payroll taxes or income taxes, would be good idea, because it would lead to a market-based solution to environmental problems as opposed to a top-down, central-planning, command-and-control, regulatory solution. But even those Republicans are usually straightforward about calling it a tax rather than a “plan to lower emissions.”

Beyond the press-criticism point, there’s a political point. Shapiro has earned some positive national press attention—some people are even mentioning him as a potential Biden replacement on the 2024 Democratic ticket—by making gestures in the direction of common-sense centrism on issues such as school choice (though there he folded) and cracking down on campus antisemitism. A $5 billion election-year tax increase on the energy industry in a year that consumers are already feeling inflation pain in energy prices—to appease suburban college-educated voters concerned about climate change—seems like more of a political loser. Perhaps Shapiro figures that if the press calls it a “plan to lower emissions” rather than a tax increase, he won’t pay any political price.

Schumer throws Israel under the bus: The Democratic leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer, who had been admirably strong in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attack, has shifted course.