NewsOK Editorial
Since spring, Washington’s political oddsmakers have figured climate change legislation had two chances in the U.S. Senate: slim and none. While a similar bill got through the House of Representatives, consensus was that legislation built on carbon emissions caps, effectively creating a national energy tax, would stall in the Senate.
Still, when liberal Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts launched their global warming bill three weeks ago, they got the endorsement of conservative Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - reportedly lured to the bill by provisions calling for new nuclear power plant construction. Might cap and trade rally in the Senate?
Let’s hope not. As Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, noted recently, Boxer-Kerry is still a bad idea at its core. Tacking on a few nuclear power provisions, which are needed, “doesn’t cancel out or eliminate a national energy tax,” Inhofe said.
Indeed, Boxer-Kerry would dramatically change life in America - as would the House-passed bill - if it became law.
The bill’s chief feature would mandate a 20 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Kerry said the bill is a “pollution reduction bill,” resisting the cap-and-trade label that refers to the government setting limits on emissions of carbon dioxide. Generally, businesses and industries that are under the caps can sell or trade their excess to those that are over the caps.
Whatever Kerry and Boxer call their bill, opponents believe it will create what amounts to a tax on any good, service or activity that involves carbon emissions - ultimately to be borne by Americans.
Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute estimates that to reduce emissions 20 percent would require returning the United States to levels last seen in 1977, when there were about 100 million fewer Americans, the economy was about half its current size and 100 million fewer vehicles were on the roads.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the House-passed bill, similar to Boxer-Kerry, would reduce economic output by up to 0.75 percent by 2020 and 3.5 percent by 2050.
The statistics suggest impact on job creation and prosperity, which necessarily would affect low- and middle-income Americans the most.
As for nuclear power, the bill rightly recognizes the necessity of incorporating nuclear in America’s energy mix. But Boxer adamantly opposes nuclear power, and there’s every reason to believe fellow Democrats in the Senate will drop the provisions once the legislating starts.
The debate on Boxer-Kerry is scheduled to open soon. Passage would be bad for America and Americans. The Senate should kill it.
The Boxer-Kerry bill would dramatically change life in America.
Read editorial here.
By Roy Innis and Paul Driessen
As the 821-page Kerry-Boxer climate bill gets fast-tracked in the Senate, as a companion to the 1427-page House bill, it is critical that we reexamine the assumptions behind cap-tax-and-trade legislation.
The Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Information Administration and other optimistic analysts claim America can limit and tax hydrocarbon use, and switch to “ecologically friendly” renewable energy, with minimal harm to families, businesses and jobs. Their low-ball cost estimates are based on assumptions that can only have come from another planet:
* We will overcome decades of fear, resistance, lawsuits and over-regulation, and double US nuclear power in just 25 years.
* Workable, affordable technologies will suddenly materialize to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from emission streams and store it underground - and won’t run into buzz saw of NIMBY and eco litigation.
* Renewable energy will generate abundant, reliable, affordable electricity that can replace hydrocarbons, power our economy and easily be integrated into the grid.
* There will be no lawsuits or opposition over hundreds of thousands of giant wind turbines across habitats and scenic areas; hundreds of square miles of solar panels in the desert Southwest; thousands of miles of new transmission lines; millions of dead birds and bats; and mining and drilling to provide hundreds of millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass, rare earth elements and plastic film for all those eco-friendly renewable facilities.
* Millions of “green jobs” will be created by mandated, subsidized renewable energy. The jobs won’t be just lawyers, regulators, cap-and-trade dealers, and wind and solar system installers. And the green jobs will exceed the millions of manufacturing jobs that cap-tax-and-trade will destroy.
* Many manufacturers, utility companies and refiners won’t have to buy increasingly expensive CO2 permits, because they can purchase “carbon offsets” from developing countries, whose leaders will gladly accept cash to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and forego jobs, prosperity and mobility for their people, by not building more factories, power plants and cars.
* Major developing countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia will slash their own CO2 emissions and economic growth by 20-50% by 2050 - so that carbon dioxide reductions achieved by American families and businesses will not be overwhelmed by skyrocketing emissions overseas.
These EPA and EIA assumptions are naively optimistic at best, and delusional at worst. They should certainly not serve as a foundation for setting energy and climate change policy, especially when global warming science itself is coming under increasing criticism for errors, exaggerations, fabrications, “cherry-picked” and “lost” data, and computer modeling that reflects neither observations nor reality.
Pending legislation (and EPA “endangerment” rulings) would hit Americans with “climate crisis prevention” programs that cost trillions of dollars - prolonging our recession and near-double-digit unemployment. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) wasn’t exaggerating when he called cap-and-tax “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”
Applying much more realistic assumptions, CRA Associates, American Council for Capital Formation and other analysts have calculated that Waxman-Markey would reduce US gross domestic product by a cumulative $9.4 trillion by 2035. Emission permit costs for energy users could exceed $300 billion per year by 2035. Average households could pay 58% more for gasoline, 90% more for electricity, the Heritage Center for Data Analysis calculated. A typical family of four could pay $829 more annually just for electricity, and up to $4,600 for energy, food and consumer goods, say Heritage, CRA and other analysts.
This is not wealth creation. It is a massive wealth transfer - from hydrocarbon users to carbon traders, non-hydrocarbon energy industries, bureaucrats, activists and other preferred groups. Poor families could get “energy welfare” payments, to offset some added costs, but small businesses and middle class families would get hammered.
Over 85% of America’s black population lives within a 700-mile radius of Nashville, Tennessee, notes the National Black Chamber of Commerce. This region depends heavily on oil, natural gas and coal for electricity and transportation fuels. Hardest hit will be manufacturing industries that provide numerous minority and middle class jobs.
The White House, EPA and Congress need to base laws and policies on reality. Instead, they are trying to tax, penalize and stymie access to oil, gas, coal and uranium resources that our nation has in abundance - energy that could generate trillions in bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues. They are forcing America to import trillions in foreign oil, imposing trillions in national debt, and taxing anything that moves to pay for bloated government spending.
We need honest, transparent legislating, economic commonsense, and reliable, affordable energy for technologies that improve, enrich and safeguard our lives. We need proof - not assumptions, assertions and computer models - that we actually face manmade climate disaster, before we curtail energy use and sacrifice dreams, opportunities, jobs, living standards, freedoms and civil rights.
We need robust debate now - not after expensive, intrusive, punitive laws have been enacted.
Roy Innis is national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for CORE and the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
By Marc Morano
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has turned his back on the latest science, economics, the Republican Party, and American national security, by announcing his new partnership with Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) to find “the winning formula” to pass global warming cap-and-trade legislation.
Graham is now touting his view that man-made global warming fears are real and can be “solved” by passing Congressional cap-and-trade legislation. Graham teamed up with Sen. Kerry to write an October 11 New York Times op-ed explaining that the GOP and Democrats should “work together to address an urgent crisis facing the world.”
Graham has latched on to perhaps the silliest of all arguments and the most insulting to voters’ intelligence: that somehow passing a congressional climate bill will lead to fewer wars in the future. Graham and Kerry wrote, “[W]e agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.”
“Even climate change skeptics should recognize that reducing our dependence on foreign oil and increasing our energy efficiency strengthens our national security,” Graham and Kerry asserted. On this point, Graham and Kerry are correct. But their claim that a top heavy cap-and-trade bill would accomplish those goals is contrary to all available evidence. First off, even if we faced the man-made global warming catastrophe that Graham and Kerry seem so confident about, we would all be doomed if we relied on Congressional cap-and-trade to save us. The climate bill was declared “scientifically meaningless” by an analysis earlier this year. Most importantly, President Obama’s own EPA is now on record admitting that U.S. cap-and-trade bill “would not impact world CO2 levels.”
A Bloomberg News article on the Waxman-Markey bill’s impact on June 26, 2009 revealed U.S. oil companies may cope with the climate legislation by “closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports.” Bloomberg also reported that “one in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020” and this could “add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline.” Far from providing “energy security,” cap-and-trade would make us more dependent on foreign sources of energy, according to the Bloomberg report. Obama advisor Warren Buffet told CNBC that cap-and-trade would also be a “huge” and “regressive” tax on Americans .
Global warming cap-and-trade would have a huge impact on congressional coffers. To understand all you need to know about the “science” of man-made global warming and the motivations of politicians to pass it, you need to look no further than Democrat Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland. In 2009, Cardin called cap-and-trade “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”
In simple terms, what Graham is hailing as some sort of “solution” to the alleged climate “crisis” is nothing more than pure Washington fluff with a huge price tag and expansion of government controls on our lifestyles. In short, it is all economic pain for no climate gain.
All of this while the science behind man-made climate fears continues in a freefall. In the past few months, we have witnessed U.N. scientists warning at U.N. meetings that global cooling is a now possible. Even the mainstream media—led by the BBC and the New York Times—is finally having their moment of clarity on man-made global warming. But Graham continues to binge on old scientific claims and empty economic promises. Global warming cap-and-trade has lost so much support that even Democrat Sen. Al Franken is bailing on the bill! In an August 6 letter with 9 other Democrats, Franken wrote a letter to Obama declaring that the U.S. “must not engage in a self-defeating effort.”
Enter Lindsey Graham to offer political cover for Democrats on cap-and-trade. Graham hopes to be able to add provision for expanded nuclear energy and drilling into the cap-and-trade bill and thus bring all sides together. Sadly, Graham knows that any promises about expanding drilling or nuclear energy can be rescinded in future years or road blocked in any number of ways. But once a cap-and-trade system is in place, it will be the nearest thing to eternal life here on Earth.
Graham tries to convince unenlightened Republicans that “killing a Senate [climate] bill is not success given the threat of [EPA] regulation” of CO2 under the Clean Air Act. But Graham knows this is a straw man argument. The last thing the Obama administration or Congressional Democrats want to do is have EPA in charge of CO2 emissions. Former President Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, admitted this was a false threat on October 12, when he wrote: The EPA regulatory threat is “no real threat” because lawsuits would “keep the EPA tied up in litigation for years.”
Graham is also touting a new U.N. climate treaty, urging the U.S. to be “in the lead again” and “produce a new international agreement on global warming.”
Graham is hopelessly naive about climate science realities, cap-and-trade economics and environmental politics. Sadly, he has morphed into a media sycophant who pines for every opportunity to get noticed by the mainstream media—to hell with his home state voters’ wishes.
Graham’s Senate website claims he “is known as a leader who never abandons his independence or strays from the conservative reform agenda.” Though Graham does have a conservative voting record overall, he has broken ranks with his home state voters and the GOP on key policy decisions (votes on immigration, the bank bailout and Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation) that differ from his political base.
Graham’s embrace of the man-made global warming fear movement could literally snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when it comes to congressional cap-and-trade bills. Never underestimate the ability of rudderless Republicans like Graham to be the key difference in passing costly non-solutions to problems that do not even exist. There exists in Washington pretenders who go along with the majority of beliefs of a political ideology or party platform just so they can bide their time—waiting to really have the most impact (or do the most damage) on the key issues that matter most to their internal ideology. Ladies and gentleman, meet Sen. Lindsey Graham: The most crystal clear example of everything that is wrong with politics (and the Republican Party) in Washington today.