Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/9/2014
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — U.S. Energy Association Executive Director Barry Worthington said here last week that with cap-and-trade unlikely to be adopted in the United States, a carbon tax is more likely to be implemented in the next several years. “The cap-and-trade legislation came about the time of the financial crisis so no one had any appetite to put a huge part of the US economy in the hands of Wall Street. So cap-and-trade isn’t going to happen, and that leaves the notion of a carbon tax being considered. Notice I said considered, I did not say recommended, just for the record,” Worthington said at this year’s Annual CCUS Conference. “I think what’s likely is that you will see tax reform, broad tax reform, being promoted over the next couple years. The carbon tax will be hidden from tax payers, just because it won’t be a line item on your electric natural gas bill. You won’t see it when you get gasoline at the pump. It’ll be taxed at the point of production or the point of import and the citizens, the voters, the tax payers, will never see that amount reflected the way you would sales tax for example,” he said.
Worthington added, “If it’s part of a larger, broader tax reform initiative, our industry might end up being in favor of it. If you reduce corporate income taxes, you reduce personal income taxes, you streamline the tax code, you have really significant tax reform, it’s revenue neutral, you could very easily see that come into the mix and I think that could up being the lever that we’ve all been looking for that ends up providing the fiscal motivation for carbon capture and storage.”
‘Storage’ Not ‘Sequestration’
In his remarks, Worthington also noted the need for improved communication from the CCS industry to help build public support. “We need to get rid of ‘sequestration.’ It’s killing us. The public doesn’t understand,” he said, suggesting the use of “storage” instead. Worthington went on to say that bad communication is not only hurting the public’s view of the industry, but also providing a weak point which the Environmental Protection Agency can use to control the industry. “We need to get our message right on is CCS commercially available or not? We create confusion ourselves. We’re sending out two different messages, we’re sending a message that it is; we’re sending a message that it isn’t. This has aided EPA is defending the claim that it is commercially available,” he said, going on to explain that mixed messages from the CCS community has allowed EPA to claim that CCS is “technically feasible and available” without garnering an organized response from the CCS community as a whole.
