Boulder’s one thing. Boulder’s small. Boulder’s landlocked.

But affixing a carbon tax-like program to a heavily-populated port city like San Francisco is a whole different animal. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District wants to charge businesses a fee of 4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide. The draft regulation imposing the new fees would go into effect on July 1, 2008.

According to a fact sheet put out by the BAAQMD (PDF here), it would take stock of how much emitted greenhouse gases were reported over a year, and charge the fee before allowing a facility to re-apply for a permit to own and operate equipment that emits pollutants.

One example provided in the initial coverage of the proposal by the San Jose Mercury-News gives is that a Shell oil refinery in the affected area would be charged $186,475 a year for its carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s a lot of money, and even a huge corporation like Shell will take notice of it. But they’ll likely fight it, too. And they won’t be alone.

In response to a Gristmill blog post comparing various carbon taxes — including Boulder’s and the Bay Area’s — one commenter opined that taxes aren’t the answer and won’t last long in the economy’s current state anyway. Incidentally, the Gristmill post itself is pretty dismissive of Boulder’s carbon tax.

A Green Car Congress post on the Bay Area fee yielded way more responses. Here are excerpts from two of the negative ones:

“This is a regular tax hike, just greenwashed.”

“Changing behavior against one will is communism at its finest. this is just greenwashed Marxism plain and simple. Socialism failed in the 1980’s so the commies invented a pending disaster to implement Marxism anew. good try comrades thankfully most of the nation does not have to deal with the united socialist state of komiefornia.”

And two more comments that might fall into a “constructive criticism” category (sort of):

“$00.42 per metric ton is nothing compared to the European market cost of $30.00 per metric ton of CO2.”

“I saw that and I also saw a video of ships going out of the bay, one trailing a large plume of smoke. I have been on the bay and I could smell the tankers under power miles away. It is good that they are doing something dockside, now for the time that they are on the water. …”

We’d love to know what you hink about these fees, as they compare to Boulder’s carbon tax. Is Boulder too lenient? Too hippied out? Too anything?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Business, Government, Greenhouse gas emissions, Measuring emissions, Other Cities, Other States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.