Judge thwarts Biden's carbon tax scheme

 Rick Moran:

Judge James D. Cain Jr., a federal judge in Louisiana, has thrown a gigantic monkey wrench into the Biden administration’s plans to implement schemes that would use the “social cost of carbon” to measure the real-world impact of climate change.

The administration was planning on using the entirely fictional number of $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to calculate taxes, fees, and the cost of infrastructure spending. It’s fictional because when Donald Trump was president, the number was $7 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions.

Isn’t it positively magical how the cost per ton of CO2 jumped seven times in a year?

Anyway, the hard-eyed federal judge decided to crack down on this nonsense.

Washington Post:

The Feb. 11 decision by a Louisiana federal judge blocked the Biden administration from using a higher estimate forthe damage that each additional ton of greenhouse gas pollution causes society. This formula, called the social cost of carbon, applies to consequential decisions affecting fossil fuel extraction on public lands, infrastructure projects and even international climate talks.

The Justice Department said it intends to appeal the Louisiana judge’s preliminary injunction. But in the meantime, the ruling could set off a scramble at federal agencies to redo their analyses of major decisions that relied on the higher social cost of carbon, a top Biden administration official warned in a brief filed Saturday.

Rather than argue why the increase in the cost per ton of CO2 emissions should be allowed, the bureaucrats are complaining that the preliminary injunction issued by the judge would create an enormous amount of work for them.

...

Democrats have a history of overestimating the impact of fossil fuels on the atmosphere.  They have a history of projecting doom and gloom including ice-free poles and coastal cities underwater.  They use these bogus projections as an excuse to levy taxes on the use of fuel to pay for the nonexistence "harm" to the environment. 

The Democrats' war on fossil fuels is already costing Americans unnecessarily at the gas pump and keeping their house habitable.  They have been shown to be serially wrong about the alleged harm to the environment for at least 50 years.  The poles are still not ice-free and New York and Miami are still not underwater.