By George F. Will. WashingtonPost.com
An unprecedentedly radical government grab for control of the American economy will be debated this week when the Senate considers saving the planet by means of a cap-and-trade system to ration carbon emissions. The plan is co-authored (with John Warner) by Joe Lieberman, an ardent supporter of John McCain, who supports Lieberman’s legislation and recently spoke about “the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring.”
Speaking of endless troubles, “cap-and-trade” comes cloaked in reassuring rhetoric about the government merely creating a market, but government actually would create a scarcity so that government could sell what it had made scarce. The Wall Street Journal underestimates cap-and-trade’s perniciousness when it says the scheme would create a new right ("allowances") to produce carbon dioxide and would put a price on the right. Actually, because freedom is the silence of the law, that right has always existed in the absence of prohibitions. With cap-and-trade, government would create a right for itself-- an extraordinarily lucrative right to ration Americans’ exercise of their traditional rights.
Businesses with unused emission allowances could sell their surpluses to businesses that exceed their allowances. The more expensive and constraining the allowances, the more money government would gain.
A carbon tax would be too clear and candid for political comfort. It would clearly be what cap-and-trade deviously is, a tax, but one with a known cost. Therefore, taxpayers would demand a commensurate reduction of other taxes. Cap-and-trade—government auctioning permits for businesses to continue to do business—is a huge tax hidden in a bureaucratic labyrinth of opaque permit transactions. It would go to a Climate Change Credit Corporation, which Lieberman calls “a private-public entity” that, operating outside the budget process, would invest “in many things.” This would be industrial policy, a.k.a. socialism, on a grand scale—government picking winners and losers, all of whom will have powerful incentives to invest in lobbyists to influence government’s thousands of new wealth-allocating decisions. Read more here.
Icecap Note: The National Association of Manufacturers projected some some startling effects of LW including: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) losses of $151 billion to $210 billion in 2020 and $631 billion to $669 billion per year in 2030; Employment losses of 1.2 million to 1.8 million jobs in 2020 and 3 million to 4 million jobs in 2030; Household income losses of $739 to $2,927 per year in 2020 and $4,022 to $6,752 per year in 2030; Electricity price increases of 28% to 33% by 2020 and 101% to 129% by 2030; Gasoline price increases (per gallon) of 20% to 69% by 2020 and 77% to 145% by 2030. A poll taken by National Center for Public Policy Research found that 65% of Americans reject spending even a penny more for gasoline in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When gasoline and electricity price increases are taken together, 90% of Americans reject Lieberman-Warner plan’s costs—even the low-range of the projected costs. An important time to call you senator’s office and express your opinion before its too late.
By Karlis Salna, News.com.au
An ABC website has been accused of portraying farmers and forestry workers as evil and telling kids how much carbon they can produce before they die. The Planet Slayer website, which can be accessed via the science section on the ABC home page, also demonises people who eat meat and those involved in the nuclear industry, a Senate estimates committee heard.
See full size image here
The site has several features including a cartoon series, Adventures of Greena, and a tool called Prof Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator to help kids work out their carbon footprint. The calculator lets users compare their own carbon output to the “average Aussie greenhouse pig” and estimates at what age a person should die so they don’t use more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources. Too much carbon production causes a cartoon pig to explode, leaving behind a pool of blood.
Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield today questioned the accuracy and appropriateness of some of the imagery and content on the website. “Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC portray the average Australian as a pig and is it appropriate for a website obviously geared towards kids to depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?”
ABC managing director Mark Scott said the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues. “The site has been developed to appeal to children and its been done in an irreverent way… to make it engaging,” Mr Scott said. Read more here. See the sick site here. See Anthony Watts right on comments here.
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic
President Václav Klaus criticized American presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John McCain for their “sad and tragic” fight against global warming, ČTK wrote on Thursday. “Environmentalists think they have the right to sacrifice the freedom of others to realize their own ideals,” said Klaus, who was in the United States to promote his book “A Blue, not Green, Planet”. Global warming has marginal significance and does not merit the huge amounts of money being invested to stop it, which could be put to much better use for other purposes, Klaus added. Klaus’s book has been published in English by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Meanwhile in the WEBcommentary story by Christopher Adamo, Chris reports “Recognizing the potential menace of the current situation and how liberals are exploiting it, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus has boldly challenged Gore to an open debate on the entire topic of “climate change.” Knowing that the tenets of his “green religion” cannot withstand intense scrutiny, it is a challenge that Gore cannot afford to accept. “
The liberal agenda, whether in relation to planetary catastrophe or the latest effort to confiscate and redistribute the private property of citizens, cannot tolerate honest examination. Thus, any effort to demand scientific evidence to support Gore’s frenzied allegations will result in immediate charges of being a “global warming denier,” an obvious attempt to link the honest skeptic to those anti-Semites who claim the Nazi holocaust never happened. Sadly, far too many on the political scene who should recognize the “global warming” alarmism as the transparent power play that it is, instead choose to seek safe haven by accepting the premise of cataclysmic man-induced climate destruction. Others, hearing constant warnings of impending disaster, may actually be impressed by their shrillness and intensity, and thus prone to believe them.
With unassailable insight, Klaus properly characterizes the moral arrogance of the global warming advocacy, again likening it to the ravages of communism with which he was so painfully familiar. At a national press club gathering last week, he compared the two sinister ideologies, sternly warning that “Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality. In the past it was in the name of the Marxists or the proletariat. This time, in the name of the planet.”
To the degree that the major media and liberal political machine take notice of President Klaus and his effort, it will undoubtedly be only to demean and undermine him. Yet as someone who understands the consequences of allowing a monster of this nature to grow unchecked he continues his fight, grimly confident in the knowledge of what awaits western civilization if the “global warming” apostles ever gain the power which they crave.