Carbon tax, executive decisions

Started thinking about these two topics today because I was quite frankly surprised at the amount of change possible in one or two days by reversing some of the Bush executive decisions. Since we as yet do not have a comprehensive list of the 200 decisions we will wait to comment, but I'm shivering at the prospect. Say what you will about George W. I would imagine that we agree with a good many of those decisions.

Now to the carbon footprint tax. The Wolverine a few weeks ago warned us to beware of that possibility--it would make the gas price look like a bargain.

I went to www.carboncounter.org to figure out just what our household emissions amount to and I had accurate, not estimated kwh and mcf. The average is 16.64 and ours is 9.17. Their "suggested donation" to offset our usage is just under $200 per year. We live modestly with no air travel this year, 2 vehicles which average 24 mpg between the two of them and approximately 2200 sq ft home and are retired.

You can either go to the website yourself or do a fairly good guesstimate using our base of .99 for heating and electricity plus 22000 miles equalling 8.18. In other words, if you have a family at home and use more utilities, need to drive to your jobs every day and transport children plus laundry, showers and day to day utility usage, you can see how it would add up.

Now think about the fact that the $200 figure is a suggested donation. When putting in a bureaucracy and the costs of running it added to the "tax" we really are talking big bucks.

Visualize this: me sitting here shaking my head back and forth..................
Ooooops..make that side to side...............

1 hour later:
Shaking more vigorously since just happened to come across a piece in the National Geographic which indicated the average footprint in the US to be 24.4 which is 50% more than the figure noted above. I'm sure we'll be seeing all kinds of numbers soon, so this is a good place to point out that everything we read needs to be verified.

see ya