» Taxing the oil companies to fund alternative energy research? That's what California's Proposition 87 would do, and the oil companies are threatening higher gas prices if it passes—even though the initiative stipulates that the tax can't be passed on to consumers.
rebecca's pocket
.: October 2006 --> Big Oil Battles Alternative Energy Tax
Big Oil Battles Alternative Energy Tax
[ 10.26.06 ]
I believe that the mechanism by which that will occur is that oil production inside California (because this tax would be on oil extracted from the ground in California) would be more expensive, so oil companies would just shift to using the imported oil, and the demand curve would take up the slack.
No price increase due to the tax, because they're not using the oil that's taxed, and because the increase happens outside of California.
I have a regular habit of voting "No" on propositions, almost everything that's a proposition would be better taken care of by legislation if it were actually a good idea, but I almost got pulled into this one because the "against" ads are so effective: I actually do think gas prices should be quite a bit higher!
But after reading the official Prop 87 documents, for this reason and a raft of other points all brought up in the official "analysis by the legislative analyst", this one's back in the "no" list.
Hi Rebecca!
It's a good idea, but the main point is our behavior regards to the energy. All people has to be respect and perform economy with energy.
Patrick
Aren't oil companies making enough money as it is? I mean here in Athens we're paying 90 cents/litre (cents in Euro language, not US,1 euro is about 1.20 US).
In the mean time the planet's heating up, and the overall health of the earth is declining.
So I think that oil co's should be taxed and ex-ante regulation should be enforced to prohibit prices going up since oil giants are making returns much higher than normal rates.
Of course I"m also for universal medicare (like we have in Canada) but that's another issue.