Francis Cianfrocca: Cap and Trade: It’s The Corruption, Stupid!
But a funny thing happened on the way to the floor of the House. The
Waxman-Markey Act went through an array of very significant changes.
For one thing, about 85% of the emissions permits will not be
auctioned off in the early years of the law’s operation. Instead, they
will be gifted to politically-favored businesses, in states and
districts with lawmakers critical to the bill’s passage. Farmers and
certain electric utilities will particularly benefit.
This amounts to an outsized transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to
private industrial interests. Why is such a thing being allowed with
nary a word of debate or public outrage?
and...
Instead, I think Waxman-Markey has been distorted far beyond its
original objectives. It’s also become a cesspool of special-interest
giveaways to rival anything that Congress has ever passed. Who knows
what its real impact on the economy will be over time?
And who wrote the thing in the first place? There are over a
thousand pages in there. It’s bigger than the national-health act.
Waxman and Markey didn’t write it themselves, in their evening
free-time, sitting together over cigars and single-malts, with American
Idol running on the TV in the corner.
If it’s like most of what Congress imposes on us, the drafting
process was supervised by committee staffers, with a lot of input from
the special interests that will be affected by it. Much of the cap-and-trade national energy tax law was likely written by lobbyists.
There’s a lot more to this moment in history than the presence of an
historic economic crisis, which in Rahm Emanuel’s deeply obnoxious
words must not be wasted. It’s also a moment in which there is
essentially no significant opposition in Congress. Because of electoral
setbacks, self-inflicted wounds and existential uncertainty, the
Republicans will have no impact whatsoever on what happens with
cap-and-trade.
It’s stupefying that Congressional Democrats feel confident enough
to try to push through a spectacular transformation of the US economy
and of global trade, in the dark of night. There’s no way to tell how
likely it is that the bill will pass either the House or the Senate.
Because there’s been no public debate, there’s no sense for how the
public wants its representatives to vote.
Is this hubris? Maybe. But there’s obviously more to it. The current
rare moment, which combines an urgent economic crisis with a complete
lack of political opposition, will not last. It’s not wise to expect
that voters will allow Congress to be so radically left-wing after the
mid-term elections. And Senators and Representatives will spend all of
next year trying to get re-elected. That’s why, as Rahm Emanuel and
Henry Waxman know, it’s now or never.
This is the wrong way to make law. If Waxman-Markey is enacted, the
United States and the world will be regretting unforeseen consequences
for decades to come. This is a law that can only be passed while the
public’s attention is being overloaded with debate on other subjects.
The reek of special interests stealing from us hangs over
cap-and-trade like clouds of poisonous fumes. Every American should be
disgusted. It’s not a bad time to remember just exactly why some people
oppose the big, activist government which has come back into vogue: It’s The Corruption, Stupid!”
Rep. Fred Upton: The Great Climate Tax
Rich Karlgaard: Waxman-Markey flunks math
ACES up her sleeve
Representatives would have had all of nine hours to study the text, assuming they went without sleep. The manager's amendment made even that impossible, because you had roughly 1,200 pages of text -- containing, at last count, 397 new government regulations and 1,090 new economic mandates -- followed by over 300 pages of text with no index that amended the previous legislation on paragraph by paragraph basis.
Economy-killing climate policies and a trade war — together at last!
If the U.S. only adopts Waxman-Markey, global warming would be reduced
by a grand total of 0.2ºF by 2100. This is too small to even detect,
because global temperatures bounce around by about this amount every
year. For those who like to think more near-term, the amount of warming
prevented by 2050 would be 0.07 of a degree.
The Economic Impact of the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Bill
If you look at the total cost of
Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from
2012-2035 for a household of four.
Is the Economic Pain Justified by the Environmental Gain?
Democracy in action: vital new legislation passed, but none knows what it is!
The House passed important new legislation on June 26. The subject
was climate change, but it will affect America in a million impossible
to anticipate ways. Of course, Congress does not care. They have not
bothered to read the bill, all 1,092 pages, nor has there been any
serious studies to anticipate its consequences. Two years of research
and modeling might not suffice to understand its likely effects on the
vast, complex US economy.
Nor, of course, has the field of climate science received the
funding and staffing required to provide a basis for trillion-dollar
impacts on the US economy. It’s as if the Apollo project was conducted
out of a garage in Palo Alto, CA.
On the House floor
David Brooks
On cap and trade, the House chairmen took a relatively clean though
politically difficult idea — auctioning off pollution permits — and
they transformed it into a morass of corporate giveaways that make the
stimulus bill look parsimonious. Permits would now be given to
well-connected companies. Utilities and agribusiness would be rolling
in government-generated profits. Thousands of goodies were thrown into the 1,201-page bill to win votes.
The bill passed the House, but would it actually reduce emissions? It’s
impossible to know. It contains so many complex market interventions
that only a fantasist could confidently predict its effects. A few
years ago the European Union passed a cap-and-trade system, but because
it was so shot through with special interest caveats, emissions
actually rose.
No climate debate? Yes, there is
Climate Debate Daily: Calls to Action and Dissenting Voices
Let's Do Something - Anything
I'm sure you've heard a lot of smart and compassionate folks tell you
lately, doing something—anything!—is better than doing nothing.
So
the House did something. It passed a "cap and trade" bill that would
ration energy, destroy productive jobs, levy the largest tax increase
in United States history and, for kicks, penalize foreign trade
partners who fail to engage in comparable economic suicide.
Now,
assuming there are no speed-reading clairvoyants in the House, no one
who voted for the 1,200-page bill—plus the 300-page amendment dropped
the morning of the vote—possibly could have read it.
And any
scum-sucking scoundrel who points out that "doing nothing" already
includes spending billions on renewable energies and living under
thousands of regulations is, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shrewdly noted, a traitor to humankind.
Speaking
of doing nothing: Though it has the potential to stagnate the economy,
the American Clean Energy and Security Act, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency itself, would not create any reductions
in emissions by 2020. The piddling impact of the bill is documented
across the ideological spectrum.
The Costs of the Cap-and-Trade Bill
In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the
U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business
failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation
among poorer populations elsewhere.
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