In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and Democratic gains in the 2012 elections, a radical old idea is getting a second look inside the Beltway. Faced with the challenge of raising revenues to pay for exploding federal government costs that neither party has any interest in reducing, the carbon tax is suddenly attracting the interest of the Left and Right. The global-warming doomsayers have been in full throat since Sandy, and a carbon tax — a disincentive to use fossil fuels allegedly responsible for global warming — has suddenly become a real possibility, on top of all the other fatuous taxes already exacted from the American public.

“I think the impossible may be moving to the inevitable without ever passing through the probable,” former South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis told the Associated Press. Inglis, a Republican, lost his congressional seat two years ago for coming out in support of a carbon tax. He is joined by the likes of former Reagan economic advisor Arthur Laffer (of “Laffer Curve” fame). On Tuesday of this week, the supposedly conservative American Enterprise Institute held a discussion of the carbon tax, while the Brookings Institution has endorsed a carbon tax as a way to promote clean energy (and, presumably, to stave off future hurricanes) as well as to reduce the deficit. Such a tax would be levied on all fuels, including, naturally enough, gasoline and jet fuel, and would add substantially to the cost of gasoline and electric power.

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