The US should adopt a carbon tax

Note: I apologize for the rushed round, but I'm really short on time -- like, I have no time at all and have max. 5 minutes a day on DDO -- and I've completely lost interest in this debate because I'm spending like 7-8 hours a day studying for exams. This debate is very simple. Pro is advancing the demonstrably false notion that climate change is a significant but preventable threat to human existence. It isn't significant, and to the extent that it might be significant, it isn't preventable by incremental measures such as a "carbon tax." Pro talks about how his impact is "bigger" than mine, because he's talking about the effects of climate change and how many people it could kill. But those aren't his impacts--those are the supposed impacts of climate change. So, even as per Pro's own flawed logic, the benefit to a carbon tax isn't saving thousands of lives, because a carbon tax isn't going to prevent all of climate change. It's barely going to reduce emissions. Even if 50% of emissions are reduced, at this point, there won't be a significant impact. [11] Researcher Susan Solomon explains, "People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years." [11] The US isn't the country with the most carbon emissions, China is. One country controlling climate change won't change anything because of the small effect the carbon tax has, and the fact that even if emissions are reduced drastically across the world, the impacts are going to stay. Pro keeps bringing up the example of Germany, so let's look into that. Here's the reality: Germany's carbon tax failed utterly. The article Pro has is from 2004, back when Germany's carbon tax was just five years old. Now, on the other hand, prices of petroleum and natural gas are sky-high, and the reduction is very low. With regard to creation of jobs, that isn't the net amount of jobs gained - merely the number of jobs created. Jobs have, undoubtedly, been lost in coal/petroleum-related industries. [12] Also, the reduction in emissions in Germany still isn't significant at all--not nearly significant enough to influence. Furthermore, there's immense uncertainty associated with the success of the carbon tax, in that the carbon tax has had no benefits in multiple countries (e.g. Australia) except to act as an unnecessary household and corporate tax that harms the working class. Pro doesn't prove that a carbon tax would help prevent any of those impacts. There's no solvency at all. So even if you buy Pro's flawed logic that says global warming is such a threat, vote Con because a carbon tax won't do anything but harm the working class and the people as a whole. There's nothing in Pro's case that even remotely suggests that a carbon tax will work like that. Pro also completely drops my point that, with the disastrous free trade deals that exist in the United States currently, the carbon tax will be an incentive for companies to move to countries like Mexico and China where they'll freely use as many fossil fuels as they want, having the same effect on climate change, but, at the same time, taking away American jobs and destroying the working class. So, even if climate change is a significant threat, there's literally no benefit to a carbon tax. But Pro's case inevitably runs into another problem: climate change isn't nearly as much of a threat as the economic threats that face the United States today. It isn't really much of a threat at all. And Pro does very little to advance his case on that issue either. Pro completely drops the issue of global warming as a direct threat. He doesn't respond to any of my studies in that regard, e.g. my criticism of climate models and the study from Nir Shaviv. With regard to ocean acidification, I don't dispute that it's happening. I dispute the cause. Pro's own source says that while there's no clear consensus on what the cause of acidification is, the probable cause is global warming because of the clear impact it seems to have, basing itself on climate models. That's right: climate models, the very form of research I refuted last round. And since Pro's own source concedes that the notion that greenhouse gases influence acidification to such a large extent relies on climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, that means Pro is wrong about the cause, and it means a carbon tax won't have any effect. Indeed, even if the US were to eliminate all carbon emissions, the effect on climate change would be negligible/non-existent. [13] So, basically, a carbon tax would do nothing to solve that problem either. But a carbon tax would harm the working class. It's a direct household tax, which means people are going to be forced to pay more money for an essential livelihood, which is inherently bad. It would disproportionately affect the poor too. [14] Whatever number of jobs is created for the purpose of enforcement, significantly more jobs will be lost. [15] Industries that rely on such energy will be negatively affected and competition will reduce, and companies will move. Pro drops that there's a direct tax to households which is harmful and causes job loss. Companies will be reluctant to shift to nuclear energy because of the cost. Pro says coal currently costs more, but he's wrong, because the stats I produced didn't concern nuclear energy as it is currently - only of next-generation nuclear plants. Pro also drops the costs from nuclear plant construction and the cost of waste management, and drops that nuclear power has greater impact to global warming than fossil fuels. That means they'll move. Pro drops the critical argument I made: that if a carbon tax is imposed, companies will outsource their fossil fuel emissions. In other words, they'll move and then freely emit fossil fuels elsewhere, potentially causing even more pollution, which renders the carbon tax completely ineffective. Pro lists a bunch of countries and states where it was a "success." He's wrong about that too. He doesn't prove "success." 2% reduction in emissions, for instance, isn't success. Even if ALL emissions are taken away, nothing is going to change and climate change remains some threat. A carbon tax won't do anything to reduce any effects of climate change or even mitigate such effects. It's a completely useless effort that will further the goal to destroy the working class, causing significantly more job loss than it creates jobs and directly harming the average citizen. [11] http://www.npr.org... [12] http://www.economics21.org... [13] http://www.cato.org... [14] http://instituteforenergyresearch.org... [15] https://www.cbo.gov...