Letter to the editor: Consumers would pay bills for carbon regulation

The Dec. 14 op-ed “Legislators should come to table for Pa.’s energy future” (Dec. 14, TribLive) offers “a form of cap-and-invest carbon regulation for the power sector” as an alternative to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). However, cap-and-invest is just a scheme by another name to impose costs on society through higher electricity prices for no benefit.

Both would charge power plants for carbon dioxide they emit. Government bureaucracies would reap billions in revenue, and the politically connected and financially clever would profit. Paying the bill would be consumers already suffering from the inflationary effects of bad policy.

As the CO2 Coalition’s 2021 analysis of RGGI concluded, the environmental effect of such regulation would be too small to measure and the economic impact harmful to consumers.

The op-ed writers accept a false premise that carbon dioxide threatens to overheat the planet. However, predictions of climate doom rely on exaggerations of CO2’s warming effect and failed computer simulations.

In fact, CO2 is a beneficial gas necessary for life. Research shows that increased CO2 levels from human activity since the Industrial Revolution have increased crop production up to 140% and enhanced plant growth worldwide. More CO2 is good.

Gregory Wrightstone

Arlington, Va.

The writer is executive director of the CO2 Coalition and author of “A Very Convenient Warming.”