hello michael below this is true north reports t v robert maynard cannot be with us today he is taking his son to taekwondo class so that should be fun i actually did taekwondo myself for a bit i lived in korea for four years and learned a struct or who instructed u s military personnel he was a korean korean military person instructing u s military on taekwondo in self defense and i was able i had the privilege to to learn and obtain a black belt and so i don't mess anyway so lou very keogh will be joining us today by phone he'll be calling in and couple of minutes my topic today is going to be the carbon tax the carbon tax is back again i apologize if this is a repeat topic but it just keeps coming up i don't know what else to say i've been writing politics and economy and so forth in vermont for a couple years now and  i think every single year since about two thousand and fifteen there has been some variation or another of a carbon tax proposed usually multiple at one time but this latest one is called the essex plan before i dive into the carbon tax i actually preface the entire debate conversation with an observation about sort of philosophical observation of the carbon tax i want to talk about nine hundred eighty four the story by penn named george orwell real name erik blair who wrote about a control system controlled society in the future well no longer the future of course but in any case at that time the future he was writing in the one nine hundred forty s where everything was controlled economically socially logically free speech everything and so the main character winston finds about halfway through the story without giving too much away he obtained some manual manual by the secret power elite and it explains how how everybody is controlled how the government does it how it suppresses people suppresses the economy and the chapter in his book the main character he obtains this manual he reads the book and the greatest challenge of the ruling class any given day of the week to maintain to maintain power is to suppress the middle and lower class economically and artificially and in the story he talks about how the three mega powers there's like a america unlike somewhere in the middle probably europe and africa  absorbs the excess production of modern technology modern human capacity of course at this time you have the emergence of factories and mass production and the ruling elite are seeing the middle and the lower class rise up and they need to create these artificial demands to push them back down and hence perpetual war now what does this have to have to do with a carbon tax the thought the thought that i want to close this preface with is think about the net cause of being an artificial cost to energy and then think about how i know it's somewhat garbled but then the notion of a ruling elite trying to think of ways to artificially suppress the economy because obviously if you read through the whole book i don't think it mentions a carbon tax but it does mention suppressing the economy and now i will get to the article itself it is the carbon ok this is that true north reports of course and it is titled carbon tax resurfaces as an electric subsidy electric power subsidy ok the carbon tax is back again but with a new name local environment and local environmentalist unveiled the essex plan at the energy action network annual meeting in champlain college last week in burlington the tax proposal endorsed by seventh generation focused on adding cost of carbon based fuels and transferring the tax revenue to watch it you tell it iis it was promoted saturday at the climate action through car through carbon pricing event hosted by the vermont public interest research group as a division by the plant's thirteen authors the essex plan will quote create jobs attract new businesses spur strategic electrification and provide the cleanest electricity at the lowest rates  england the authors of the plan the authors say the plan will lower utility bills quote for every vermont for every vermonter in vermont business and quote and offer refundable rebates for low income and small in the beginning and then it would increase over the years and it would shift that money to electric utilities so it's actually like a tax for the subsidy in one shot it's taken money off of the carbon based energy and  a cost to carbon based fuels and shift that money to a lot trick utilities and i'm making a sort of half assumption here although i think it's pretty accurate they're trying to promote a lot to cars and electric heating and obviously a lot trick alternatives to carbon based fuels and where i was going to go next with that was to say that the issue with that is and we actually kind of talked a lot about this in our prior show but carbon based third rail here in vermont is and this may be a little it's well i wouldn't say it's off topic but nobody ever talks about what he and what he would is a carbon based fuel  and a lot of her monitors burn wood you know we we hear a lot about promoting you know with chip wood pellet fuel and that sort of thing but you know you're paranoid it produces a lot of carbon dioxide goes up the chimney along with water vapor and other you know particula yet that's never discussed i always find that interesting the if you think about this taxes on carbon based fuels so presumably this will be shifting some people if it was implemented of course it would be shifting some people towards what he exactly exactly mean is if i get a heavy tax on my heating oil i may just go in you know i used to have a wood furnace khurana founder and co owner of black river produce talked about how part least for him part of this appeal of the carbon tax was indeed to move people towards w heat and i have a quote he says but then all of the sudden oil came way back down talk about the price of oil oil came way back down and i thought well it's cheaper for us to burn oil than it is to burn w pellets that are made here and windsor vermont fifteen miles away so here he's making the argument in a totally reasonable argument i suppose that you know he thinks that it's better to tax the oil because it will push people towards the local economy you've got wood pellets are at least in this case produced right here fifteen miles away from him and i imagine a lot of the wood pellets if not all of them are are produced around here and so for him it's like well this is going to support the local economy which is a totally legitimate argument but as you just pointed out if the idea is to reduce carbon footprint then there is that to exactly that it doesn't work you know so it's sort of everybody has blinders on and some of this discussion you know if you want to be totally logical then you know i wouldn't think supporting the manufacturer would tell it makes any sense i mean i don't agree with that but you know it you start getting into this pursing of what carbon based and what isn't  me so my large takeaway from this whole essex plan taking money away from carbon based fuels and pushing it in the electric energy  sector the issue with that is electric power as we discussed with the cars in the prior show it is more expensive the electric cars are heavily subsidized right now a lot trick heat while getting more efficient than it's ben i think they call it the cold heat pumps they are a newer and more efficient technology for electric heating but they are still not quite up to par with the prices or i should say down in prices with that with carbon based fuels so it sounds sounds great and wonderful on the surface while we're going to take money from one thing and put money in another but you're taking money from the cheaper thing and putting it into the more expensive alternative and we just need to be clear about that and we have another caller ok oops i dropped one one  lose going to have to call back sorry looks ok i was calling somebody there yeah i'm here can you hear me all right you know this phone call is kind of like the whole carbon thing is totally confusing my comment is you know we're talking about you know if we if we end up going forward with this carbon tax and initiative which you know the far left is going to push push push push for whatever their agenda might be just because they want to text text and then we start talking about maybe we start taxing more on and on wood burning people except for a i got well it's a crude fact that happened a after day after day especially in the northeast kingdom specially in the southeast part of oh no i hung up on the other guy oh sorry sorry anyway lou you're back if you want your color i lost the color we're going to have to figure out how to how to get two people at once i apologize if you're still so anyway well we'll get that down before the next episode so he was talking basically about kind of the wood with products being shipped around between  yeah ok yeah yeah i think and i apologize if i bought you this but to summarize and everybody else heard it i think what he's getting with getting at is it's just that inefficient to and i'm paraphrasing here but that's what i thought like i heard i heard the caller saying and you know i wanted to mention earlier this week i was down in manchester at burton burton academy and the  faces you know one of the things that i was surprised that it was kind of a bipartisan agreement that for months definitely needs tax reform although no discussion  at least in theory i would think that it would definitely go along with what what the democrats and republican legislators on the scales were talking about they were all from bennington county but  it's you know while there seems to be some bipartisan agreement that you know things like property tax and there's a you know a lot of burden on on a certain sector in the vermont population basically the working vermonter is you know what about carbon tax that seems to be to get from the discussion when we talk about tax reform is why are we moving is all about a society that's suppressed and controlled by this sort of global government he talks about how when the main character winston finds like a manual on how they control everybody it talks about how they need to create an artificial pressure as sort of artificial cost on the economy of the world and they achieve that through perpetual war you battleships are built and then it's destroyed and battleships are built again in a destroyed and the reason they have to do that is because without people wasting their production they would rise up and you know presumably be able to challenge the ruling class and the reason i brought that up for the carbon tax was i feel like  to add a cost to energy and mean that i understand that mr orwell or eric blair may may not have ever envisioned a carbon tax in his time but when i read that book for the first time and then years later heard about the carbon tax the connection in my mind just went like snap like wait a second to me it's feels like the perfect artificial sort of barometer to push down on the economy well i mean there's many things in nineteen eighty four which of course was a really already on nine hundred forty eight which is when you win or well perceptive of you to make that that connection i mean if you out a cost to energy everything's going to go up and anything and everything you can think of is going to cost more if you add a cost energy and they they  present it as well we're going to make a lot trick energy cheaper well that's fine but you're taking that from a tax on what's already cheaper so the net the net impact is still going to be a higher cost in energy that's  article it is true north report it is not on the main page but if you click on t r t n our news carbon tax resurfaces as lots of power subsidy and it's got an interview with one of the founders who makes a totally logical and reasonable argument for some of the positive things that would happen from it and then it also has a some comments from some of the critics rob roper of the ethan allen institute and i believe those are the two main assault blames radical campus elements this is one of your articles why don't you introduce this one professor allison staying or was pretty much the individual who wouldn't fight it the controversial author to the campus was involved the courts really went international to news coverage of the because he couldn't he couldn't even speak so their plan was to take him to a room on campus where they would stream you know let him continue the lecture which they did then  afterwards the author in saying or were confronted by students in some other questionable individuals whether or not they were students or n t five type people who were at you know there to disrupt roughed up you know both individuals you didn't hear much from saying or after the incident she was injured she understand had a neck injury was in the local hospital and middle y surprisingly went on sabbatical and she sort of disappeared from from campus view and then she popped up a couple weeks ago with brian lamb on c span and did a interview which you can view of go to c span site you do that or actually read my article i have the link there might be easier than searching for it and you know she kind of tells all i don't think she went as hard as she could have on on the disruption on campus but she pretty much blamed the leftist elements on campus and also outside agitators on creating you know the whole mishap you know what we got the interview cued up i'm just going to play a minute or two of it if that's all right well see how this works is i myself at harvard benefited enormously from interacting with some of the great conservative thinkers there people like harvey mansfield james q wilson even samuel huntington these are professors with whom you could disagree profoundly but that sure you know the whole book is about this distribution this change what about the bell curves the patent and the current style and i heard it and it was one of those cases where he said yeah that's a wonderful pleydell to me it refers to the picture on the front of the book that's it looks like a bill and it's a phenomenon you see in all kinds of things in nature whether it's height or weight or in this case i ok so you just heard an excerpt of the video and it's kind of the opposite of what happened on last week's show we couldn't hear it but apparently the audience did so that's better better that way than when last week anyway or last month well anyway so let's just continue from there even though we didn't hear what she said the audience did and you can continue to explain well maybe if i might chime in real quick  my observation is if you disagree with something and you feel like that idea is poor and should be you know  and be challenged and put down in society you need to let that happen in the free market of ideas the moment that you start using violence you're not only discrediting yourself but you're  guest lecturer there as being able to give his ideas which they branded as racist and you know conservative which i disagree with the race is part definitely perhaps conservative but i'm probably more libertarian i think everyone lost in that whole incident is you know gave the college a black  and a lot of negative press which i think is going to take a long time for them to recover and unfortunately the author who was there wasn't even there to speak about the bell curve the controversial bell coauthored back in the eighty's he was there to discuss a new book a newer book i should say which he never even got an opportunity to do so i think everybody lost  just i think it just illustrates the new mccarthyism on college campuses where you know if you were perceived as not being politically correct you're shut up right right yeah it shocked me you know it's funny i actually found out about this story in national news i wasn't reading vermont news when i stumbled on i'm not talking about the one you wrote it in particularly when this hit the headlines  when it first happened right it happened in march and i think i was actually getting the headlines on drudge report and i saw middlebury college and i thought to myself that's vermont i clicked on it and i was quite shocked  well i want to say i was shocked but with all that unfortunately with all the headlines going on around the nation and you know we had all those riots and he was berkeley university when they try to have u c berkeley right so again i mean i'm i'm just trying to think if i really believe that and i don't i think would be a whole other debate even get into it but if i really believe that this author is a bad person and needs to be shot and it needs to happen in a free market of ideas you know that once you once you resort to violence it's just discrediting everybody you know and it's crediting actually i bet now there's going to be some people who are going to go look at the bell curve and say why why why why was i discouraged  it's well you know and the professor professor sanger i mean she had every good intention you know since she's a political you know teaches political science on campus that you know she thought it was good for students to come in and maybe have a discussion you know ask him some hard questions if they disagreed with him but they didn't even give him the opportunity to express himself and you know  but i bet a lot of the students never even read the book have no idea what he said and we're just taking a few radical interpretations of his work and running with it you know white  feathering the man right and you know i just think it was not only a black eye of the college but i think the whole state of vermont suffered our image once again of being you know sort of a monolithic state naturally cynical so it didn't surprise me but actually two of attended the event and gone and you know as a member of the fourth estate to be there to cover it for true north reports and i also  and the editor of the for moneygall weekly newspaper in which is published in middlebury i went to to cover the events for both news outlets and it was gosh it was embarrassing not not to me but  it had to have been and i could just see specially the the folks from the media department at the college i mean they were just beside themselves knowing that there was nothing they could do to calm the students down they