Thursday night, a committee in the House of Representatives passed an ambitious climate bill ”” a big step toward having a law that controls greenhouse gases. At the heart of the bill is a mechanism called cap-and-trade. It’s a careful mix of government mandate and free-market economy. How successful it will be is a matter of some debate.
Cap-and-trade is one of those wonky terms that have permeated the world of Washington, D.C. Part of its mystique is that a lot of people don’t know what it really means.
What cap-and-trade means is simple for climate skeptics: higher electric bills, higher gasoline bills, increased cost of products, manufacturing outsourcing to nations that do not observe cap-and-trade, the rise of new middlemen making money off this and more lobbying of Congress from such middlemen to milk this cash cow even more. This will also hurt the poor and underprivileged by making necessities such as heating and transportation prohibitively costly. Of course cap-and-trade will be taxed too.
that’s pretty much it Adam 12, here are the gory details:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTVjYTkzYmNjMTA4NmE2MzZmOTllYzVhM2U4MjYyNDY=
As if our current financial disasters weren’t enough …
So, if understand this, we are going to impoverish ourselves: [blockquote]And all this for a negligible environmental gain: “All of these costs,†the report concludes, “accrue in the first 25 years of a 90-year program that, as calculated by climatologists, will lower temperatures by only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century.†[/blockquote]
Sigh, so President Obama is not going to raise our taxes. Instead, he is going to raise the price of everything else. And significantly in some cases (your electric bill alone will likely double). Peruse his budget, though, and you will see that there are hundreds of billions in income to the Federal Government in later years from selling carbon allowances. Unfortunately, we will end up paying for those licenses. He is redefining ‘trickle down’ economics. His version is to ‘trickle down’ the tax increases. And it will likely not affect ‘global warming’ at all.
Look on the bright side. The Democrats and everyone who voted for Obama will be very happy.
Yep, but doesn’t he sound so Presidential when he speaks? Everything else doesn’t matter, as long as we finally have someone in the White House who doesn’t sound like -uh – a stuttering -uh – baboon.
By the way, an internal White House Obama Administration [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-SvGLPjm5w]Memo[/url] admits that the policies around Climate Change stem from POLITICAL decisions, not scientific ones, and will have very expensive consequences for even small businesses in the US.
We are intended to impoverish ourselves, to empower the government. Cap and Trade is supposed to pay for government health care. ( I did not say universal. It would be doled out to the government favored. ) The evident goal is to use the hysterical fraud of anthrogenic climate change (note that the grifters have stopped calling it “global warming”) to ensnare us in the trap of complete government supervision over our lives. I suppose that each subject, er, citizen will evenually have to have a “cap and trade” number in order to participate in the public economy. Perhaps tattooed on their forehead.
Our only hope at this point, is that, realizing that the perfect storm of unopposed control of two branches of our government is only assured for one more year, that the current administration will be forced into too much haste to be able to successfully subdue us. It appears that the plans to nationalize the automotive industry are stumbling due to too much haste.
Sorry, that link was to a video fo Sen. John Barrasso of Wy. presenting the substance of the memo to the Senate committee on the environment. The memo can be found [url=http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=0900006480965abd]on this site[/url] clikc “view” for a .pdf of the file.
libraryjim #7, you know, he doesn’t sound very presidential to me. He sounds, often, like a boring policy wonk making unsubstantiated assertions, and he has a way of pursing his lips to make him look like a disapproving schoolmarm while making said statements. But then, I often don’t agree with him and see the holes in what he says. I do try to focus on what he’s saying and not on his personal presentation style.
. . . and things were going so great when the Bush was president.
[blockquote]. . . and things were going so great when the Bush was president. [/blockquote]
As bad as Bush was on statist boondoggles and deficit spending, our current Dear Leader is in a class of his own when it comes to power-mad schemes that will impoverish our nation. Or maybe you can give us a cogent reason for, in the teeth of rising unemployment and a failing economy, it’s a great idea to pump up taxes and impose regulations that will raise prices.
The picture showing two smoke stacks at Emmits, KS emitting “black smoke” are misleading and probably intentionally so.
A fossil-fuel-fired steam boiler regularly needs to clean accumulated soot particles from its ‘fire tubes’ in order to maintain a high level of heat transfer from their ‘fire sides’ to their ‘water sides’ and to their superheater ‘steam sides.’
This is often done once per day at a set time and the evolution lasts about one to five minutes. That means that the photographer merely needs to be ‘on-site’ at the scheduled time for the event in order to snap the picture.
Note that the third smoke stack in the photo shows no smoke and that is what the exhuast from a high efficiency and high temperature boiler should look like. A clear high efficiency smoke stack emission can contain fine particulate matter, but this needs to be measured using appropriate instrumentation.
The fact that this picture was printed alongside the article leads me to believe that it was included to deliberately elicit an emotional response from the reader that would make him more sympathetic toward the political thrust of the article.
This is an example of what seems to be ‘broken’ in today’s political world. Honesty has taken a holiday and political intrigue has taken over. Its all about winning and not about ‘solving the problem.’
Bt the way, I used to be a chief engineer on a Navy destroyer-type ship and I believe that qualifies my technical analysis of the pictures.
Katherine:
Sarcasm, my friend, based on what so many of my friends told me was the reason they voted for “the Big O”.
Yes, I knew that, libraryjim, #14. Lots of people voted based on superficials.
We all survived the “cap and trade” Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 during the first Bush administration, and no one complains about acid rain anymore which was the point back then.
Cap and trade brings the market to bear on a problem. It encourages and values innovation allowing those who can efficiently reduce pollution to sell their extra credits and earn a return while allowing those who can’t reduce pollution to purchase allowances rather than pay for expensive reductions.
I suppose that if you don’t agree that we have a pollution problem that can be improved by innovation then it is a burden.
#16, I don’t believe we have a CO2 pollution problem. Worldwide, there are lots of particulate emission problems and water pollution problems. But even if CO2 were a pollutant, the analyses of those who support the cap-and-trade idea show that this won’t make a significant dent in CO2 emissions. It’s a tax and control burden, not a fix.