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July 7, 2009
How bad is cap and trade? Let me count the ways...
Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson at National Review have already done some counting and they've come up with 50 reasons to oppose Waxman-Markey - for starters:
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture - which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison.
They see the bill as deforming "American politics and economic life."
Since no one in the House bothered to read this monstrosity, Spruiell and Williamson did their jobs for them. What they found is startling. Just a few of their 50 reasons not to support this bill:
1. The big doozy: Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction - they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you're wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that's why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you.
2. The sale of carbon permits will enrich the Wall Street investment bankers whose money put Obama in the White House. Top of the list: Goldman Sachs, which is invested in carbon-offset development and carbon permissions.
7. Agribusiness is exempted from cap-and-trade controls, but the farm lobby will be given permits to sell and to profit from anyway. All carrot, no stick - precisely what this powerful industry lobby is accustomed to receiving from Washington.
14. Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete - and ensuring that these "investments" pay out inflated union wages.
And that's just goodies for special interests. There's also ruinously expensive mandates that would, among other things, require 20% of electricity generated by 2020 to be "renewable." We are currently at about 3% generation of renewable energy so in a little more than a decade we must find the technologies generate 7 times as much renewable energy as we do today.
Read the whole thing and get educated.
Lenin once said that when the time came, corporations would sell the commies the rope with which they would hang them. In this instance, corporations received a stay of execution by groveling before government in order to receive perks and cash that will enrich them while driving the rest of us to the poor house.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky