By Tom LoBianco, Washington Times
President Obama’s climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House’s initial estimate of the so-called “cap-and-trade” legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House. A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president’s climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.
“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that’s a big number,’” said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides. The plan seeks to reduce pollution by setting a limit on carbon emissions and allowing businesses and groups to buy allowances, although exact details have not been released.
At the meeting, Jason Furman, a top Obama staffer, estimated that the president’s cap-and-trade program could cost up to three times as much as the administration’s early estimate of $646 billion over eight years. A study of an earlier cap-and-trade bill co-sponsored by Mr. Obama when he was a senator estimated the cost could top $366 billion a year by 2015. A White House official did not confirm the large estimate, saying only that Obama aides previously had noted that the $646 billion estimate was “conservative.”
“Any revenues in excess of the estimate would be rebated to vulnerable consumers, communities and businesses,” the official said. The Obama administration has proposed using the majority of the money generated from a cap-and-trade plan to pay for its middle-class tax cuts, while using about $120 billion to invest in renewable-energy projects.
Mr. Obama and congressional Democratic leaders have made passing a climate-change bill a top priority. But Republican leaders and moderate to conservative Democrats have cautioned against levying increased fees on businesses while the economy is still faltering. House Republican leaders blasted the costs in the new estimate. “The last thing we need is a massive tax increase in a recession, but reportedly that’s what the White House is offering: up to $1.9 trillion in tax hikes on every single American who drives a car, turns on a light switch or buys a product made in the United States,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner. “And since this energy tax won’t affect manufacturers in Mexico, India and China, it will do nothing but drive American jobs overseas.” See post here.
This press release, reported how Senator Inhofe Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, went to the Senate Floor this morning to expose the cap and trade tax scheme included in President Obama’s budget. The following are excerpts of his Senate Floor speech:
“The Administration’s decision to include cap and trade - and the revenues generated by it - in the budget forces my colleagues here in the Senate to no longer hide the ball. It allows us to have an honest debate about the costs of a program of this magnitude on the American people - not to mention the enormous redistribution of wealth for pet projects and programs under the umbrella of ‘clean energy.’ To put it simply, they are realizing that cap and trade is a regressive energy tax that hits the Midwest and the South harder than the East or West Coasts.
“In this time of recession and economic pain, the Administration and proponents of mandatory global warming controls now need to be honest with the American people. The purpose of these programs is to ration fossil-based energy by making it more expensive, and therefore less appealing for public consumption. It is a regressive tax that imposes a greater burden (relative to resources) on the poor than on the rich. That is because the poor spend a larger percentage of their income on energy costs than the rich.
“There is nothing in it for taxpayers, consumers or the climate. If it is time for anything, it is time for us to get realistic about these policies, and focus on what is achievable, both globally and domestically, to help bring down energy costs to consumers and make us more energy secure so the American public doesn’t get yet another raw deal.
“Let us be honest. The total costs of the program will be well over the $646 billion when you factor in the private sector mandates and the total costs to reduce emissions. If past economic models are any indication, the total costs of a program could be 3 times more expensive than what the Administration’s numbers predict. And the Administration’s numbers of just the auction revenues aren’t small, roughly $80 billion per year.”
By Craig Idso, CO2 Science
Politicians who bow to the demands of the world’s climate alarmists have long sought various means of reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. To date, the measures they have proposed have been rather mundane, focusing primarily on reducing emissions associated with one’s household activities and transportation habits. For example, we have been encouraged to replace our incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient ones. We’ve also been asked to participate in municipal recycling programs, to drive less, to car pool or to utilize public transportation. But the “rules of the road” will soon be become much more stringent, and you and I may be asked - if not mandated by law - to make an unprecedented lifestyle change that could dramatically curtail one of our most cherished personal freedoms, all in the name of “saving the planet.”
Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University - Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax - identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals.” In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, “the carbon legacy of an individual,” and to examine “how it is affected by the individual’s reproductive choices,” based on the premise that “a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him.” So what did they find?
The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2 emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.
In light of these calculations, Murtaugh and Schlax conclude that “the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” adding that “enormous [our italics] future benefits can be gained by immediate changes [our italics] in reproductive behavior,” and, therefore, that “an individual’s reproductive choices can have a dramatic effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or her genetic lineage.”
We can only hope, in this regard, that everyone’s future reproductive behavior will continue to be a matter of choice. But in light of the supposedly “enormous” CO2-related “benefits” of curtailing child-bearing - especially in the United States - no one can assume that such will continue to be the case, especially in light of the claims of climate alarmists such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, who consider CO2-induced global warming to be the greatest threat to the survival of civilization ever to be encountered. Faced with such a unique and unparalleled threat, we could well awake one morning and find ourselves with no choice in the matter, mandated by law to only procreate to the extent deemed ecologically appropriate by those enlightened few who somehow simply “know” what is best for the biosphere.
It may seem unthinkable today that our government - of the people, by the people and for the people - would ever assume the power to tell us how many children we can and cannot have. But much has happened in the past few months that truly was unthinkable, and only a single year ago. And if it’s happened before, it can happen again; for in times of crisis - either real, as in the current economic crisis, or imagined, as in Al Gore’s climate crisis - normally-rational people can do some wildly-irrational things. We must, therefore, maintain the eternal vigilance that is needed to preserve our God-given rights that no one has the authority to rescind. Stand up with us and demand that your elected officials carefully scrutinize both sides of the CO2-climate debate and think for themselves. We need thoughtful men and women of integrity to guide our nation, not mindless lemmings. Read text here. See video below and full size here.
See Chris Horner’s take on this here.
By Rep. Carl Gatto, Alaska
We try to stay informed, read the newspapers, watch the news on TV, and still we missed a major event that affects our future and our pocketbooks. 700 scientists, economists, and public policy experts from 20 countries met in New York City in early March of this year. They concluded that global warming, if it is ocurring at all, is probably natural rather than man-made.
The message from 700 of our best and brightest scientists who studied this issue, based on science and observation, was very different from Al Gore’s message and President Obama’s message. Gore claims that there is a crisis in our atmosphere, that a calamity is occurring, and in ten years the atmosphere may suffer irreversible harm. Gore and Obama offer their solution: cap the production of energy from fossil fuels, tax carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, create a “cap and tax” bureaucracy, make most forms of energy very expensive, and transfer our personal wealth to government wealth all to perform an absolutely worthless and unnecessary task.
The Gore-Obama plan is to collect CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground forever, spending trillions of dollars doing it. In return, we get nothing, unless you count the $645 billion in additional taxes, something that all Americans will pay every time they buy a product or fill up the tank of their car or truck.
Global warming alarmists want us to believe that the temperature of Earth would stay the same year after year, century after century, if not for “the human presence.” This is scientifically false. Huge climate changes have occurred before humans could possibly have played a role. More recently, global temperatures rose from 1900 to 1940 (1934 was the century’s warmest year), fell from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 1998, and declined from 1998 to 2008. How does “the human presence” account for this variation? It can’t.
Most people have noticed the recent cooling that is taking place: extended cold snaps, snow accumulations, snow falling in southern states where “it does not belong” and staying around way too long. Satellite data confirms that the Earth has been cooling since at least 2001, and probably earlier.
Al Gore says “soaring global temperatures will bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” “Global warmers” also predict no more agriculture in California, and in ten years the oceans will be toxic and all life could die. And yet, we’re halfway to the much-feared “doubling of CO2” in the atmosphere, and none of these disasters has even begun to appear.
Global warming’s true believers say trains carrying coal and other fuel to cities are really death trains carrying poisonous fuel to “coal-fired factories of death.” Whew, Hollywood horror films could not top this stuff. But there is more: hurricanes, melting polar ice caps, polar bear extinctions, dust bowls, and anything else about the weather than you can imagine.
Let’s look at the facts. Nearly 85% of US energy consumption is carbon-based, and reducing that figure by using wind, solar, and other renewable sources will take a long time, be very expensive, and may not even be technically possible. Scientists (and farmers) know carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” The vast majority of it is produced from natural sources, not human activities, and plants and forests use CO2 to grow and produce oxygen for all living things. Ordinary air contains roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and a paltry 0.038% carbon dioxide. Scientists - including several who presented at the New York conference - are quite unsure that a tiny increase in that tiny amount of CO2 is having any effect on climate. Many scientists believe negative feedbacks more than offset whatever warming the CO2 might be capable of causing.
Our whole solar system is showing signs of climate change, including Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and even lonely Pluto. There aren’t any SUVs on those planets. What all the planets have in common, though, is that they receive heat from the sun and they are affected by cosmic rays and other galaxy-wide processes. Nothing we do can compare to changes in sun spot activity and brightness when it comes to changing our climate.
Our climate appears to be once again reversing course and cooling, repeating a cycle that has repeated itself thousands of times in the past. Glaciers advance when the Earth cools, then make up for all that work by retreating when the Earth re-warms. Human activities may have a little impact, but is it good or bad? Worth preventing? No one knows.
So for the time being, let’s accept that the Earth’s climate has been wide-ranging for five billion years. That’s our planet’s history, and we are here in spite of (or maybe because of) all those changes. Thank God for that. Read more here.