Upon hearing that a number of liberal Senate Democrats from that body’s recently formed and self-anointed Climate Action Task Force intend to stage a “talkathon” on the Senate floor this evening, the White House was of course duly supportive — probably because the strategy so closely mimics their own when it comes to climate change. In a nutshell, it’s all about the politics, not so much about the legislation, via The Hill:
The White House said Monday it “absolutely” supported plans by Senate Democrats to hold an all-night “talkathon” intended to highlight the impacts of climate change.
“We commend those who are participating because it’s a very important subject that the president, as you know, is concerned about and has a climate action plan dedicated to addressing,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters. …
Carney on Monday also highlighted instances from the president’s Climate Action Plan where Obama had used regulatory authority to act to address climate change where Congress had not.
“He has taken steps in his first term and again in his second term and will continue to take steps to both reduce our carbon emissions and to make sure that we’re more prepared for the effects and impacts of severe weather, for example, which is a byproduct of the climate change that we’ve seen,” Carney said.
The White House, of course, has the added advantage of all of these “executive actions” to at least add a little more oomph to their relentless all-of-the-above-yet-super-climate-serious politicking — but too bad all of their ideas resemble the same top-down, cronyist market intervention and costly regulatory burdens they’ve been pushing for years now. The budget they revealed last week was chock full of ’em, like pushing still more tax breaks for alternative-energy vehicles, good grief:
The White House is proposing cutting taxes on liquified natural gas to spur the use of the fuel by alternative vehicles, while again calling for hiking the maximum tax break for electric vehicles and other advanced vehicles to $10,000, over the current $7,500.
In the U.S. Treasury’s nearly 300-page analysis of the Obama administration’s tax proposals as part of its budget, it lays out a series of proposals to boost alternative vehicles. The sweeter tax breaks for EVs and other advanced vehicles would cost $4.8 billion through 2024.
The Treasury Department said the budget would make the credit available to a wider range of technologies and remove the cap placed on the number of vehicles per manufacturer that can receive the credit.
But the bigger tax cut would not apply to luxury vehicles with a sales price of more than $45,000, including the Tesla Model S and the Cadillac ELR. The tax credit for those vehicles would be capped at $7,500.
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