Word: coaling
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...days after the Inauguration. He realized Clinton would shy away from taxing the carbon content of fuel, for example, after asking the President's advisers whether they were willing to run afoul of Senate Appropriations chairman Robert Byrd, the powerful West Virginia Democrat whose state mines carbon-rich coal. "If you go over the options yourself and think about the difficulty of getting anything through Congress, you can see what questions to ask, and what's likely to happen," Goodgame says. "That's the connection between politics and economics...
...type and amount were still unresolved, the choices had apparently narrowed to either an ad valorem levy, essentially a sales tax on the wholesale price of fuel, or a BTU (British thermal unit) tax based on the heat content of fuel. Either would apply to every kind of energy -- coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power -- and for every use -- running cars and trains, heating homes, firing factory boilers, generating electricity. A 5% ad valorem tax would raise about $18 billion a year over the next five years. A BTU tax, which Clinton is said to lean toward, could...
...would also blast coal mining states from Pennsylvania to Colorado and would raise costs for coal-burning utilities and their customers. In a recent letter to Clinton, Richard Disbrow, chairman of the American Electric Power Co. argued that a coal tax would "burden the steel, auto, metalworking, chemical, plastics, paint, paper and primary manufacturing industries, which rely heavily on coal-fired electricity and carbon-based fuels." Such objections seem likely to doom the levy. "Forget the carbon tax," says a top Democratic strategist on Capitol Hill. "If you're looking at 1996 -- and they are at the White House -- that...
This looks like Clinton's No. 2 choice. A 5% sales tax on energy would raise $18 billion a year and cost the average family about $100 a year in higher gasoline and electric bills. But oil and gas producers object that the levy would favor coal companies because their fuel is cheaper and they would therefore pay fewer taxes. Environmentalists complain that a sales tax would fail to sock it to coal and thus do little to help stop global warming. "It misses a tremendous opportunity to do good for the environment at the same time you're meeting...
This is the presumed White House favorite. Its impact on the deficit and on consumers' pocketbooks would be virtually the same as that of the sales tax. Yet it would achieve more pollution control because of its greater impact on coal, which has a high BTU content in relation to its price. Even so, a BTU levy would be far less punitive than a carbon tax. "The BTU tax doesn't cause ^ any big shift in fuel choices," says an official of the United Mine Workers union. "We prefer it to the carbon tax, which could destroy our industry...