Investors Business Daily

Taxes: While the oil and gas companies are bearing the brunt of taxation, regulation and environmental angst, others are doing just fine, thank you. If you think cap-and-trade is dead, just follow the money.

According to a recently released Center for Responsive Politics review of reports filed with the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, General Electric and its subsidiaries spent more than $9.5 million on federal lobbying from April to June - the most it’s spent on lobbying since President Obama has been in office.

Why? As the fight over cap-and-trade grows, so does lobbying. Since January, GE and its units have spent more than $17.6 million on lobbying - a jump of 50% over the first six months of 2009.

GE is just one of many organizations and individuals that stand to make money if cap-and-trade makes it through Congress. GE makes wind turbines, not oil rigs, and has a vested interest in shutting down its fossil fuel competitors.

In an Aug. 19, 2009 e-mail obtained by Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, General Electric Vice Chairman John Rice called on his GE co-workers to join the General Electric Political Action Committee “to collectively help support candidates who share the values and goals of GE.”

And what are those goals, and just what has GEPAC accomplished thus far? “On climate change,” Rice wrote, “we were able to work closely with key authors of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives. If this bill is enacted into law, it will benefit many GE businesses.”

GE is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which advocates cap-and-trade legislation and leads the drive for reductions of so-called greenhouse gases. One of its subsidiaries was involved in Hopenhagen, a campaign by a group of businesses to build support for the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference, which was supposed to come up with a successor to the failed Kyoto Accords.

To be fair, coal and gas companies lobby too, both out of self-preservation and self-interest.

But they produce a useful product that creates jobs and boosts GDP. Alternative energy, even after huge subsidies, adds little to our energy mix. Evidence suggests alternative energy is a net job loser, siphoning resources from productive areas of the economy.

Renewable energy sources like wind, solar energy and biomass total only 3% of our energy mix. Spain’s experience is that for each “green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost due to the siphoning off of resources that private industry needed to grow.

There’s money to be made in climate change even if the climate doesn’t change, and the profit motive may now be the main driver of cap-and-trade.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) was formed to buy and sell carbon credits, the currency of cap-and-trade. Founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.”

It could very well be if cap-and-trade legislation like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices necessarily skyrocket, and as companies buy and trade permits to emit those six “greenhouse” gases.

As we have written, profiteering off climate change hysteria is a growth industry as well as a means to the end goal of fundamentally transforming America, as the President has said was his goal.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called climate change a religion whose zealots seek the establishment of government control over the means of production. It reminds him, he said, of the totalitarianism he once endured.

After the Climate-gate scandal broke, Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said of the scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and those they worked with: “They’re criminals.” He also called them “huckstering snake-oil salesmen and ‘global warming’ profiteers.”

Like the scientists who lived off the grant money they received from scaring us to death with manipulated data, others hope to profit off perhaps the greatest scam of all time. See this important post here.