Bernie Sanders Climate Change Plan Has Two Huge Mistakes

Is he actually trying to reduce carbon emissions? Or simply grab votes from environmentalists?

by Stephen Steinberg (@SL_Steinberg on Twitter)

Two days ago, Bernie Sanders released his brand new climate change plan, so naturally it was popping up all over Facebook, welcomed with open arms by the #FeelTheBern crowd.

Usually when I see Bernie Sanders propaganda, I snarl at the screen for a few seconds before moving on. But this time, I decided to see what he was proposing for our country.

Whoops. Mood = destroyed.

Most of his general claims smelled fishy, and upon digging a bit deeper, two major parts of his plan make literally no sense.

Yes, it’s noble to refuse to buy votes with SuperPAC money. But how is proposing empty policies solely to garner votes from environmentalists any different? I digress…

Before addressing the two major problems in his plan, I wanted to point out that it does have one sort-of good aspect —

Implementation of a carbon tax. Although conservatives usually attack the idea, a carbon tax is one of the truest pro-market reforms possible if done correctly. Correctly means revenue-neutral, or off-set with a reduction in taxes somewhere else. However, Bernie’s overall view of taxes is that they will go up for everyone, so he almost got something right, but not quite.

Problem #1: Bernie’s Plan Phases Out Nuclear Energy

Nuclear energy has for the most part been safely used in America since it’s inception. The US Navy has been using nuclear energy to power it’s submarine and aircraft carriers for over 60 years with no incident.

Actually, the Navy did a study and charted radiation exposure to sailors assigned to nuclear powered ships. Keep in mind that the upper exposure limits are 5 REM per year, and these heros literally live next to nuclear reactors for months at a time —

Safe nuclear power is not only possible — it’s being done as we speak.

But aside from the fact that it’s a safe, emission-free source of energy that we can use right now, we already get nearly 20% of our nation’s energy generated from nuclear power —

Source: US Energy Information Administration, 2014

There are only two sources that currently generate more energy than nuclear — natural gas and coal. If we phase out nuclear, how do you think we are realistically going to make up for that deficit?

Well, lucky for us we don’t have to guess, because centrist think-tank Third Way partnered with MIT to release a report saying that net carbon emissions would go up if nuclear power was phased out.

Slate.com also jumped on Sanders for overlooking nuclear power —

In calculations for Slate, Michael Shellenberger, one of the founders of the“ecomodernist” philosophy that advocates for a technology-focused approach to tackling climate change that includes support for nuclear power, figured out that “under Sanders’ proposal to not re-license nuclear plants, U.S. carbon emissions would increase by a minimum of 2 billion tons, about the same amount as the U.S. produces each year making electricity.” Though Sanders says he would replace that nuclear with solar and wind, Shellenberger notes that “as long as there is any fossil fuel on the grid, lost nuclear power is always replaced by fossil fuels. Even if it is nominally replaced by renewable power, a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity that replaces lost nuclear electricity is a kilowatt-hour that is not available to displace coal and gas from the grid.”

So why would Sanders decide to phase out nuclear? Good question — it must come down to the politics, because the facts don’t agree with him.

Problem #2: Deceiving language on big oil subsidies

Remember when we as a nation despised career politicians? Bernie Sanders has been a politician since 1981. And the way he spins the truth about these “subsidies for big oil” really highlights that fact.

Bernie claims he will, and I quote — “End the huge subsidies that benefit fossil fuel companies”. He pegs these subsidies at $13.5B per year over the next decade.

First of all, these are not “subsidies”. A subsidy implies that money is given to do something. When Bernie says “subsidies for big oil”, that’s the vision he wants you to have in your mind. But what he’s referring to aren’t subsidies at all- they are tax breaks. But “subsidy” is a politically-driven word, and Bernie know that, so he uses it.

Also, I have no idea where he got $13.5B from — he’s surprisingly short on details. According to the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Commonsense, there’s only $5.5B of tax benefits exclusively for oil companies, and an additional $5B in tax benefits that go to all companies, not just oil companies. So that gets us to $10.5B, still $3B short from Bernie’s claim.

According Mother Jones, a left-leaning publication, the United States “subsidizes” the oil industry at $4.8 billion per year, referring to the tax breaks exclusively for the oil industry, and identifies three tax breaks specifically.

The largest of the three “tax breaks” that they identify — writing off drilling expenses — according to them, amounts to somewhere between $700M and $3.5B per year, or 15% to 73% of that $4.8B.

Problem is — it’s not a tax break at all, and costs the US Treasury exactly $0.

The general rule of thumb is that when a business buys an asset, it is to depreciate the asset over time, as opposed to expensing it upfront. The only difference between the two is when the asset’s expenses affects your taxable income, not how much it affects your taxes overall.

According to the IRS, an oil company is allowed to expense 70% of an oil well’s expense upfront and depreciate the rest. This has absolutely no affect on how much oil companies ultimately pay in taxes, it just changes how that tax bill is paid over the lifetime of the oil well. To claim this costs the US government money is simply untrue and seems like a cheap effort to fire up his crowd instead of offering a serious solution to carbon emissions.

Even looking at the bigger picture, oil companies pay some of the highest effective tax rates of any industry as it is —

According to this interactive New York Times chart, oil companies pay, on average, a 37% effective tax rate, with Exxon Mobil paying 37%, Chevron paying 39% and ConocoPhillips a whopping 74%. Obviously this changes year-to-year and is a function of earnings as well, but you get the point. The average effective tax rate of all companies is 29.1%.

Bernie is short on details and misleading the facts

Of course we all want a cleaner environment with less pollution and less reliance on foreign oil, but please look at the facts before LIKING, SHARING, or COMMENTING Bernie Sanders’ policies — more often than not there’s more than meets the eye.

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