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Lobbyists who wish to tax commercial airlines to death to address fears of climate change

A frightening essay on climate change emanates from Washington, DC's International Council for Clean Transportation (ICCT). Frightening, not because of any catastrophe that climate change threatens, but because of new onerous taxes, bans and mandates that commercial air carriers must face to meet the supposed threat.

Wikipedia says the ICCT is an American multinational non-profit public policy think tank and research institute that supposedly provides technical, scientific and policy analysis for environmental regulators on environmental, energy and transportation policy. In other words, global warming propaganda.

What's frightening about this is the underlying assumption that the horrors of climate change are assumed to be as self-evident as the nose on your face, and that we must tax the citizenry hugely and continuously to "address" this "emergency". Not to solve it mind, but to mitigate it without much of a notion of what good a 'carbon zero" rating by a certain date will achieve in terms of concrete mitigation.

Then there is the harm global warming will do. Ask Wikipedia about society's worst fears arising from climate change, and it says: "It has become increasingly clear that climate change has consequences that reach the very heart of the security agenda: flooding, disease and famine, resulting in migration on an unprecedented scale in areas of already high tension; drought and crop-failure, leading to intensified competition for food, water and energy."

In short, the worst threat Wikipedia can produce, appears to be no more than what mankind has coped with many times before. Moreover, what flooding, disease, famine, mass migration, drought and crop-failure that exist in the world seem quite unrelated to climate change. Far more likely, these are caused by deliberate policy changes designed to foster these threats rather than counter them.

Most will agree that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming. But even its most dire threats will not materialise in a meaningful way for a century or so. And what is completely ignored is what other experts say, that CO2 is plant food and results in the greening of the world's deserts, and might well produce more arable land in Russia, China and Canada.

First CO2 only contributes 0.04 per cent of greenhouse gases. What's more, human activity only contributes 33 per cent of that, a figure which was produced to debunk the claim that human activity only contributed 3 per cent of that 0.04 per cent. Either way, if size matters, the threat is small, and far from being a clear and immediate danger.

What is increasingly self-evident in the last year or two are the revelations emerging from the testimonies of whistleblowers and the evasive bureaucrats at congressional hearings is that public trust in what government says in general, and what government says about health science in particular, is at a very low ebb.

One can confidently assert that as climate change and the war in the Ukraine are topics about which the American public have little if any trust in government. Not after being told that the chief concern of the White House was the injury US Border Patrol officers might suffer from Texas stringing razor wire along the Mexican border.

But forget the whys and wherefores, the focus of the latest foray of the tax-and-spend lobbyists of the International Council for Clean Transportation is how to tax commercial aviation - given the urgent need to "address" climate change.

It is clear to all, except for the craven, captive legacy media, that our worst fears, are wars spreading beyond Ukraine, Israel, Yemen and now threaten Taiwan that have absolutely nothing to do with climate change, but more clearly linked to corporate and bureaucratic quests for money and power.

According to the ICCT essay, the world's most climate-vulnerable countries scored a victory at last year's COP 28 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai) when delegates agreed to implement a Loss and Damage Fund. The fund aims to collect money from wealthier countries and provide it to poorer ones, contending with the worst impacts of global warming.

What is so galling is that outfits like the ICCT are done with talking about the material threats involved. The real business of the moment of finding the funds to keep the ever spreading climate change collection bureaucracy extending its reach to expand its grasp.

"To have a real impact, the fund needs diverse and long-lasting revenue streams, in addition to pledges already made by some national governments," said the ITTC essay. "That's why various taxes have been proposed over the years, including levies on aviation, maritime shipping, and financial transactions.

"In light of the COP developments, we analysed how much revenue a tax on airplane tickets could raise for the Loss and Damage Fund. Such a tax would provide a more stable and scalable funding source than voluntary, typically one-off financial assistance from wealthier countries.

"There are already examples of such taxes. The French solidarity tax on airplane tickets  charges to finance efforts by the global health initiative Unitaid to combat infectious diseases in the Global South.

"Though this tax is only one example, it suggests that aviation taxes can be used to raise significant funds for international causes.

"Moreover, the ICCT's previous research found that certain aviation tax policies can be a more equitable way to raise revenue from those most responsible for the sector's emissions. A tax on frequent flyers would raise 90 per cent of its revenue from the richest 10 per cent of the population.

"There are, however, competing needs for the revenues from a potential aviation ticket tax. Decarbonising international aviation will require up to US$5 trillion in technology investments by 2050. We recently published an analysis showing that these investments in order to have the greatest and quickest impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions should be prioritised early in any taxation scenario and focused on emerging technologies.

"Policymakers could, therefore, consider frontloading aviation tax revenues for mitigation in the near term and then gradually shift toward financial assistance related to loss and damage and to helping developing nations adapt to climate change," said the ICCT essay.

This represents the tip of a single taxation iceberg, 90 per cent of which is out of sight in hundreds of other economic sectors where untaxed revenue dangles like low-hanging fruit. What must be decided by the lowest orders of each industry is whether global warming is a threat that is worthy of such funding for so little gain - or even prospect of any gain given by even the most optimistic of its advocates. If there is no gain in prospect, then taxes must be resisted, first among one's colleagues as a talking point, and then among higher pay grades. In this way a new confidence can be won by each economic sector that it did not have before.

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Parasitic organisations that devise ways to tax industry to fund parasitic bureaucrats to protect us from the phantom horrors of climate change should be opposed, says the author. Do you agree?

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