Democrat gas tax starts this week

Another Democrat Screw Job

• The People's Republic of California's cap-and-trade policy for gasoline and diesel fuel goes into effect Jan. 1, and will show up quickly at the pump.
• If warming gasses are bad just ban them.  But in this case warming gasses are just an excuse to re-distribute the wealth of the people to the government and to the Elites anointed by the State.

(Press Enterprise)  -  California’s long-disputed and often-misrepresented cap-and-trade policy for gasoline and diesel fuel goes into effect Jan. 1, and it will show up quickly as a roughly 10 cent-per-gallon increase at the pump.

That follows months of market actions in the United States and around the world that have dropped the global price of crude more than $50 a barrel since June and created the longest recorded consecutive-days fall of fuel prices.

The average price-per-gallon for regular unleaded gasoline in the Riverside-San Bernardino metro areas stood at $2.68 by the middle of last week, down almost 94 cents from a year ago.

The cap-and-trade increase, which will appear within days, is well below the 16 to 76 cents per gallon that the Western States Petroleum Association had forecast as recently as August.

Conversely, there will indeed be a price hike at the pump directly linked to the state’s cap-and-trade policy.

California’s Air Resources Board officials had suggested earlier this year that the petroleum industry was unnecessarily passing along those added costs to consumers, a contravention to standard business practices.

In this latest round of cap-and-trade, petroleum industries that produce greenhouse gases above a set standard — the cap — must either buy through auction the allowances (also called permits) equal to their emissions to allow them to continue operating. If they go below the cap, they can offer their unneeded allowances for sale to others - the trade.

There have been plenty of emissions over cap-and-trade during the months leading up January 2015; not all of them have been carbon dioxide.

“Robust debate is valuable, but that debate is undermined when the public is told either that this change won’t (or shouldn’t) cost them anything or that the cost will be many times higher than the most reasonable estimates,” Severin Borenstein, professor of business administration and public policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas, wrote in an August article.

Borenstein’s estimate of a cap-and-trade-caused price increase of between 9 and 10 cents a gallon was echoed by ARB spokesman David Clegern, who said earlier this month that consumers should expect an increase of 10 cents or less per gallon, adding it was up to suppliers to determine how the costs are passed along.

Jerry Azevedo, a spokesman for the California Drivers Alliance, the group responsible for the “hidden gasoline tax” ads that warned of the 16 cent to 76 cent-a-gallon increases, said Monday that the lower estimate was part of a “growing consensus.” The alliance was funded by the Western States Petroleum Association.

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each according to his need."
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