The Energy 202: Democrats Enter the Lion’s Den to Talk About Climate Change

The Washington Post covers an event surrounding carbon tax with Myron Ebell at the American Enterprise Institute.

President Trump’s ascent to the Oval Office should have hit pause on any legislative effort to curb climate-altering emissions.

Yet chatter about one proposal continunes — a tax on carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. In February, a group of Republicans — led by James A. Baker, who served in both Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s Cabinets — pitched a version of that emissions-reduction measure to Trump officials.

No new White House policy came out of that meeting. But now a pair of Democratic senators are trying again, reaching across the aisle in their own branch of government to sell a carbon tax as a way to smooth the bumpy road to tax reform.

…

But Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEE) and head of President Trump’s transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency, called the proposal dead on arrival.

“I’d like to see the anti-oligarchic leftist Democrats like Sen. Whitehouse defend taking money out of the pockets of poor people and putting it in the hands of people who own shares in major U.S. corporations,” Ebell said on the panel after Whitehouse spoke.

“The reason that’s in there,” Ebell said of the corporate tax break, “is that they want to lure some Republicans to front this effort, and that is not going to work because conservatives are the stupid party but not that stupid.”

Read the full article at The Washington Post.