They say there are two kinds of intelligence: Book smarts and Street smarts. Book smarts are good when you are trying to make a better living through self-improvment. Street smarts are essential when you want to live in the real world rather than some impossible-to-achieve fantasy world.
Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the perfect example of someone who has book smarts, but has almost no street smarts whatsoever.
As evidence, I present a letter that Dr. Hansen wrote to Barack Obama in which he tells Obama how to use the Global Warming Hoax as a means to implement a socialist policy of wealth redistribution.
This isn't a joke. He wants a "carbon tax" on petroleum products believeing that such will encourage Americans to "move beyond fossil fuels." Here are some excerpts from his letter:
| The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry. The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels. |
Any first year economics student will be able to tell you that the "appropriate effect" will be artificial price increases all across the board. In other words, anything that uses fossil fuels to get from the producer to the consumer will go up in price. Gas, oil, food, clothing, construction costs, infrastructure costs, public services costs, etc. Everyone will be paying higher prices.
How does Hansen think the public will respond?
| The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts. No large bureaucracy is needed. A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money. A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend. |
First, if Hansen honestly believes that Washington would enact any kind of tax without creating bureaucratic positions to oversee such a tax, then he really has no street smarts at all.
Second, why does it have a maximum share for two children? Is this Hansen's way of telling people how many children they are allowed to have? A way of implementing dictatorial population control?
Third, another thing that Hansen doesn't realize is that the ultimate effect of his proposal would be to subsidize the American people for paying higher fuel prices. In other words, force higher prices by enacting a tax, and then redistributing the tax proceeds so that people can turn around and pay the higher prices. There is no net gain there at all and nothing gets done. Money simply passes from one set of hands to the other and there is absolutely no productive result to show for the transfer.
And another point that shows how out of touch Hansen is with reality is that he actually makes the claim that paying higher fuel prices (and all other inflationary costs that result from such higher prices) would stimulate the economy!
Here is what he has to say about that:
| A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective. It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead. |
Yeah, let's look at that one for a minute. What would low and middle income people do when costs increase but their paychecks remain the same? They cut back. They cut back on food purchases. They cut back on anything that involves transporting the kids. They cut back on educational resources. They cut back on shopping. They cut back on their recreational activities. They cut back on whatever vacation trips they had planned. In short, they cut back on anything that is affected by the artificial price increase that this lunatic tax would cause.
Again, as any first year economics student will tell you, the net result of all these cut backs is to cause the economy to shrink, but Hansen has completely deluded himself into believing that it will cause the economy to grow!
I don't know of any rationally thinking person who would agree that any of this would be good for low and middle income people.
The Greenhouse Effect Theory and its Anthropogenic Global Warming fellow travelers have been shown to be hoaxes by legitimate scientists as we see average global temperatures drop and record snowfalls thorughout the world. Now we know why the hoax is being perpetuated. Socialists like James Hansen are trying to convince socialists like Barack Obama to use the hoax as a power play for themselves and further wreck our economies as well as the dreams of low and middle income Americans.
This carbon tax is easily one of the most idiotic fantasies ever to be floated in political circles.
Also, proposals like this are a prime example of why Michael Crichton was so firm in his commitment to keeping politics and science completely separate.
You can access the original letter on-line here:
Hansen's Insane Proposal Published At Columbia University
Dr. James Hansen
And here is another blog entry regarding James Hansen's crackpot claims:
Dr. James Hansen Gets It Wrong Again
84rules
November 17, 2008
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