Newly-elected Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like all too many who believe a carbon tax can help stop runaway greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, needs to understand that anything the public perceives to be a tax on anything is unpopular.
"There's been a predominant conversation in Washington, D.C., that's been led by economists and politicos that have tried to frame a carbon tax as the only way," said Evan Weber, national political director with the Sunrise Movement, which has backed Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal. "It's proved time and time again to be not politically popular and we haven't even priced the policy at where economists say it needs to be. The idea that a carbon tax is the way out of this mess is something we need to be pushing back on."
It's an easy sell for the global-warming deniers to demagogue clean, efficient energy when the ruling troglodyte Apartheid Republican Party convince their constituents that global warming and climate change are, as Trump shrieks, a "Chinese hoax."
Climate change affects everyone's health and quality of life. Global warming costs billions in increasing respiratory disease worldwide, crop failures, famine and desertification due to droughts, increasing floods, coastal land erosion, ocean acidification and the invasion of tropical diseases and insects that destroy native species.
No matter to them that taxpayers are forced by the Apartheid Republican Party "lawmakers" who continue to lard out hundreds of billions in subsidies to Big Coal and Big Oil while slashing research and development and tax credits for alternative-energy sources such as solar, wind, thermal, advanced battery capacity (lithium and vanadium) that are becoming more efficient and, therefore, more competitive cost-wise with the fossil-fuel industry monopoly and their shareholders who are terrified of losing to newer alternative-energy sources.
These are viable and doable solutions and they are all at the cusp of changing the way we think about energy use. But, it will take a public-relations Manhatttan-like project to advance the technology that is here right now. It simply needs to be developed in the same way that a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was able to build the nation's interstate-highway system. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez can help lead the way forward.
The country and the tepid party she represents can use more of her energy and resolve during the short, two-year window now that Democrats finally have power in the Peoples' branch of congress.
Progressives, forward-thinking leaders and voters will need to jettison the rotted, antediluvian, mole-visioned ossified yahoos in the Apartheid Republican Party, particularly their ignorant, whoremongering, adulterous, grab-them-by-the-pu**y traitor in the Oval Office in 2020.
