Growls

MarketWatch reported earlier today that “President Barack Obama urged lawmakers . . . to approve a sweeping energy bill, that would set up a system for slashing greenhouse gases and boost renewable energy, a top campaign goal that he says will create jobs and wean Americans off of foreign sources of energy.”

On Tuesday, June 23, we growled that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scheduled a vote (for Friday)  on “a sprawling climate change bill,” and urged taxpayers to urge their representatives in Congress to vote NO on the Waxman-Markey. The Wall Street Journal editorializes now, discussing “cap and tax fiction.” writing:

“Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.

“Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. According to the CBO, the climate legislation would cost the average household only $175 a year by 2020. Edward Markey, Mr. Waxman's co-author, instantly set to crowing that the cost of upending the entire energy economy would be no more than a postage stamp a day for the average household. Amazing. A closer look at the CBO analysis finds that it contains so many caveats as to render it useless.

“For starters, the CBO estimate is a one-year snapshot of taxes that will extend to infinity. Under a cap-and-trade system, government sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap gets cranked down over time to reduce total carbon emissions."

For a more complete explanation of how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “grossly underestimated the cost of cap and trade, see this Heritage Foundation “web memo” and this “fact sheet” explaining the “high cost of cap and trade” and “why the EPA and CBO are wrong,” see here and here, respectively. Heritage also released a video today explaining why “cap and trade won’t save the earth.”

The American Thinker also has two articles worth reading. One discusses how the “EPA makes a mocker of due process.” Marc Sheppard writes:

“But on the final day of the public commentary period, a dispatch was submitted to the EPA accusing them of attempting to cover-up an internal study that imperiled the outcome predetermined by both the agency and its puppeteers – the Obama administration. And the intraagency emails attached to the letter -- submitted by Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) general counsel Sam Kazman [PDF] -- leave little room for doubt.

“One EPA office director actually demanded that the endangerment-challenging study be barred from circulation within the agency, never disclosed to the public, and not placed in the docket of the proceeding.  And, as Kazman observed dead-on, the communications between that EPA National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) Office Director -- Al McGartland -- and study author Alan Carlin, an NCEE Senior Operations Research Analyst, made clear that it was the study’s conclusions rather than its merit that earned it its place on the trash heap.”

In the second American Thinker article, Larrey Anderson writes:

“Make no mistake: the big bad wolf of truth  is about to blow the straw house of global warming to bits. This is why there was a sudden shift. in the last nine months, from the use of "man made global warming" to "climate change" by the proponents of the theory.

"The scientific tug of war over whether or not the planet is heating or cooling has been going on for over 100 years. The difference between the past and our current situation is that governments around the world are passing (or attempting to pass) draconian laws and enforcing (or attempting to enforce) authoritarian treaties in order to "regulate" the planet's temperature.”

RealClearPolitics (RCP) also has two interesting views related to global warming and the so-called “green job” movement. In one, Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin ask “could “Australia blow apart the great global warming scare?” They write:

“As the US Congress considers the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Australian Senate is on the verge of rejecting its own version of cap-and-trade. The story of this legislation's collapse offers advance notice for what might happen to similar legislation in the US—and to the whole global warming hysteria.

“Since the Australian government first introduced its Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) legislation—the Australian version of cap-and-trade energy rationing—there has been a sharp shift in public opinion and political momentum against the global warming crusade. This is a story that offers hope to defenders of industrial civilization—and a warning to American environmentalists that the climate change they should be afraid of just might be a shift in the intellectual climate.”

In the second RCP article, Washington Post columnist George Will wonders why America is emulating “the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?” Will then describes "a report, which, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependet upon it."

Finally, in an editorial, entitled "Waxman-Markey: Man-Made Disaster," Investor’s Business Daily says: “The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump.” IBD explains:

“Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.

“The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.

“It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a "man-caused disaster," a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect "terrorist attack." But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill.

“Its centerpiece is a "cap and trade" provision that has been rightfully derided as "cap and tax." It is in fact a tax on energy everywhere it is consumed on everything it is used to make or provide.

“It is the largest tax increase in American history — a tax on all Americans — even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase.

“It's a political bill that could come to a vote now that a deal was struck with farm-state legislators concerned about the taxation of even bovine flatulence.”

My apologies for the length of this growls, but it was important for it to be complete. Please call Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) at (202) 225-4376, and tell him to vote NO on Waxman-Markey, H.R. 2454. To submit your comments to Rep. Moran in writing, use his "web-form (click-on Rep. Jim Moran).