By Steven Pearlstein, Business Columnist, Washington Post

Climate bill ‘badly flawed’: ‘It would be difficult to implement even in Sweden’ - ‘It’s not too late to change our minds’

Something very important has been happening this week—more important, if you can believe it, than what Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding or why Kris Allen scored his upset victory on “American Idol.” I refer to the marathon committee markup on Capitol Hill of a monster piece of legislation that promises to reduce by 83 percent over the next 40 years the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from American cars, power plants and factories.

There remains a robust argument over whether the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 represents a crucial step in preserving life as we know it. But there is no question that there are few pieces of legislation that are likely to have a more profound effect on the U.S. economy. It would bring about dramatic changes in the relative prices of energy and goods produced by energy-hungry industries. It would redistribute trillions of dollars in business sales and household income and generate hundreds of billions in government revenue. And it would represent the most dramatic extension of government’s regulatory powers into the workings of the economy since the early days of the New Deal.

There are probably not more than a few hundred people who really understand what’s in this legislation, how it would work and what its impact is likely to be. The other thing to say about it is that it is a badly flawed piece of public policy. It is so broad in its reach and complex in its details that it would be difficult to implement even in Sweden, let alone in a diverse and contentious country like the United States. It would create dozens of new government agencies with broad powers to set standards, dole out rebates and tax subsidies, and pick winning and losing technologies, even as it relies on newly created markets with newly created regulators to set prices and allocate resources. Its elaborate allocation of pollution allowances and offsets reads like a parody of industrial policy authored by the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal. The opportunities for waste, fraud and regulatory screwup look enormous.

The result is an unwieldy compromise with lots of belt-and-suspenders redundancy. But now that we know what a climate-change bill looks like when it is jury-rigged to accommodate all the special interests, maybe Americans will be willing to reconsider one of the cleaner, simpler approaches—a carbon tax with all the revenue rebated to households, for example, or a cap-and-trade system that generates enough revenue to erase the national debt, or even a tough new regulatory regime requiring businesses to produce more fuel-efficient cars, buildings and appliances.

It’s not too late to change our minds. Read full post here.

Dr. Edward F Blick, Retired Prof of Engineering and Meteorology, Univ. of Oklahoma

Waxman and the Dems are in a “full court press” to pass “Cap and Tax” in the next few days. They need to read the attached paper. It proves Global Warming is a Rotten Egg hatched by the UN, using Al Gore as their Joseph Goebbles. (if you tell a lie long enough and often enough, people start to believe it!)

Charts at the end of the paper, show that most of the high temperature records of all seven continents and Oceania were made before 1940!  Between 1880 and 2000 the temperature in the U.S. rose about 0.3 deg. C. For this Waxman and his friends have got their “underwear in a wad” and want to waste trillions of dollars that will turn off the lights in America? Unbelievable!

The evidence of the warming we had in the 2Oth Century was because we were coming out of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1300 Ad until the early 1800s. Our Sun was more active in the 20th Century than it had been for thousands of years. There is no man-made global warming! Unfortunely during this past 9 years our Sun has done a 180, and we have entered a cooling phase. All sorts of snow and ice records have set. Glaciers have started growing a gain in Alaska! There has been a drastic reduction in sun spots and solar magnetic storms. The sun seems to be mimicking what occurred in The Little Ice Age. How long will this global cooling last. Some Solar weather experts are predicting the cooling phase may last a decade, or a half century or more. In any event, our government should be listening to real experts and start planning in the event this global cooling continues. More people die from cold than from heat! During The Little Ice Age millions died from famines and diseases. It doesn’t take much cooling to kill off croplands in Canada, northern U.S. and northern Europe.


See larger image here.

Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, as some members of our government claim. It is aerial fertilizer for plants. CO2 is presently about 385 ppm, but it was up to 450 ppm in the 1940s and the early 1800s. If CO2 drops to 200 ppm, plants get sick, and if it drops to 160 ppm, the plants die. Humans can tolerate CO2 levels up to 50,000 ppm . Sailors in US submarines live and work in 8000 -1000 ppm CO2 levels. Greenhouse growers for 100 years have been enriching greenhouse atmospheres with 1000 ppm CO2 levels to increase their yield. The increase atmospheric CO2 levels in the 20th Century greatly increased crop yields and tree growth. If congress decides to sequester CO2 (pump it into old oil or gas wells) they will lose the farmers votes and consumers, when crops fail and food prices skyrocket!

CO2 is being used as a phony excuse to kill off the use of coal and oil. Oil was discovered in 1859. at about the same time we started using coal. In 70 years America went from living like “Little house on the Prairie”, (horse and buggy, outhouses no electricity) to planes, trains and automobiles, electricity and indoor plumbing! In just 70 years we built the most highly developed civilization that ever existed.! Why...because we discovered an extremely high concentration of energy in a small package, oil and coal. Folks we can’t run our civilization on windmills. solar panels or biofuels! windmill can hardly make enough energy to make a windmill. I know about windmills, having developed a new type of windmills back in the 1970s. I’ve also built my own solar panels. These thing are useful in some very restricted, isolated areas, but they are never going to replace coal and oil. Any politician who says otherwise is a snake oil salesman and is planning on destroying civilization as we know it. We will be back using horses for transportation, Will the CO2 emanating from trillions of tons of horse dung on our streets cause global warming?Scientific illiteracy is part of the problem with Waxman and friends, but we know the big reason for their campaign to control carbon is...."If you control Carbon you Control the World”. (Richard Lindzen. Climatology Professor, MIT). Years ago Baltimore newsman H. L. Mencken wrote about Politics 101; “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by scaring them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Folks, we can stop this Trillion dollar bank robbery if enough of us contact our congressmen and inform them if they vote with Waxman on this bill we will work to get them defeated in the next election. Read more here.

By Dina Cappiello and H. Josef Hebert, Washington (AP)

Legislation imposing the first nationwide limits on the pollution blamed for global warming advanced in the House late Thursday, clearing a key committee despite strong Republican opposition.

The Energy and Commerce Committee approved the sweeping climate bill 33-25 after repeatedly turning back GOP attempts to kill or weaken the measure during four days of debate.

The panel’s action increases the likelihood that the full House for the first time will address broad legislation to tackle climate change later this year. The Senate has yet to take up the issue.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, said the bill represents “decisive and historic action” to increase America’s energy security and deal with global warming. “When this bill is enacted into law, we will break our dependence on foreign oil, make our nation the world leader in clean energy jobs and technology, and cut global-warming pollution,” said Waxman.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has promised to press for passage of climate legislation this year, but prospects remain uncertain, especially in the Senate. President Barack Obama has told Congress he too wants a bill this year, ahead of international climate talks in December.

The House bill requires factories, refineries and power plants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and six other greenhouse gases by roughly 80 percent by mid-century and hasten the nation’s energy shift away from fossil fuels by putting a price on carbon dioxide releases.

Only one Republican - Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California - crossed party lines in support of the bill. Four Democrats voted against it. She said that while she had concerns about the bill, including its cost, the country can’t wait “to make needed changes to our energy policy.”

Waxman had vowed to get the 946-page bill out of his committee before Memorial Day. Pressure on lawmakers to leave for the holiday recess pushed the committee to wrap up late Thursday after considering more than 80 amendments, 56 of them from Republicans and many designed to weaken or kill the bill.

“The American people are overwhelming calling for a new direction ... to take action in a way that changes forever our relationship with imported oil, with the loss of jobs overseas, with the pollution that is causing greenhouse gas warming on our planet,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a co-sponsor of the bill.

Republicans argued that the pollution cuts would lead to soaring energy prices and threaten economic growth by imposing new costs on energy intensive industries already facing economic hardships.

“We don’t want to put the economy in jeopardy,” said Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican. He offered an alternative that would have scrapped the cap on greenhouse gases and pollution trading scheme, provide more incentives for nuclear energy and bolster research into capturing carbon from coal-burning power plants. It was defeated 35-19.

Barton said he had “serious concern about the redirection of our energy policy in America.”

“For the sake of our nation I hope to some degree you are right. I’m afraid that you’re not. We will see,” Barton told Waxman minutes before the vote.

To ease the economic impact, supporters of the bill said, the government would issue pollution allowances, or permits, to businesses that could be traded on the open market. The bill calls for giving away 35 percent of the pollution permits to electric utilities that otherwise would likely pass the additional costs onto consumes. The government also would sell 15 percent of the allowances and use the money to provide direct relief to consumers.

“It is very clear that ratepayers are going to be protected,” Waxman insisted.

To get the support of Democrats from coal and industrial states, Waxman agreed to give away significant emissions allowances to industries in their states, including the electric utilities, steel manufactures, automakers and refineries. Waxman also scaled back the required greenhouse gas reductions between now and 2020 from 20 percent to 17 percent. And he eased the requirement for utilities to use renewable energy such as wind and solar for electricity production.

Democrats also added language to create a clean energy bank to disperse grants for new forms of energy and inserted a “cash for clunkers” program that would provide rebates to consumers who turn in gas guzzling vehicles for more fuel-efficient cars.

See post here and more at Climate Depot.