The Environmental Spectator
Of Two Minds About Cap and Trade
Montana's governor was for the national energy tax before he was against it.
Is hyper-bipolar a word?
If so, it would aptly describe the global warming policy views of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who this year also has additional roles as chairman of both the Democratic Governors Association and the Western Governors Association.
Last month Schweitzer appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and shocked the host with his views on cap-and-trade energy rationing legislation that is moving through Congress:
Maher: …it’s an incentive to make clean energy.
Schweitzer: Maybe.
Maher (shocked): Maybe?!
Schweitzer: It also says to the biggest utilities in America, “We’re going to add a trillion dollars to your bottom line. We’re going to franchise you, and only you, to be the only producers of CO2.” I think it’s the wrong approach.
Maher: You do?!
Yes Bill, he does. Maybe. But he didn’t before. Probably.
Gov. Schweitzer still (we think) believes that, despite leveling (if not lowering) global temperatures since the late 1990s, that fossil fuel combustion to energize human wants and needs is dangerous. All those byproduct greenhouse gases overheat the earth and cause all sorts of trouble, you see.
Back in December 2005 Schweitzer created a blue-ribbon panel to recommend policy actions to reduce those nasty gases. The result was the Montana Climate Change Advisory Group, which delivered its recommendations to the governor in November of 2007. Schweitzer was so inspired that he joined six other state governors (and two Canadian provincial ministers) as members of the Western Climate Initiative, whose primary goal was to form a joint carbon emissions reduction agreement. His new partners welcomed him aboard: “We look forward to working with you and your representatives over the coming months as we move toward our August 2008 goal to design a regional cap-and-trade program.”
That move comported with earlier statements by Schweitzer, including testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in February 2007. “I'm just going to give you some suggestions…,” he said. “Develop a cap-and-trade system. We have states that are going it alone. Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico and California announced yesterday. There will be other coalitions. We can't have a cap-and-trade system that is regional. We need a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide that is national.”
And shortly before joining WCI, in an article that explained many governors’ support for cap-and-trade legislation co-sponsored by Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Sen. John Warner, Schweitzer told the New York Times, “Here's a novel concept for Congress. Do something. Anything. Move.'' The article also noted an Environmental Defense-sponsored television ad in support of the bill, in which Schweitzer appeared with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.
Then shortly after the November election last year, Schweitzer (as vice chairman) co-signed a letter with Huntsman to President Obama, on behalf of the Western Governors Association. The pair urged immediate action to solve “our energy dilemma,” using code words for cap-and-trade: “[We] propose a mandatory national system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that makes maximum use of market-based mechanisms.”
But the next month Schweitzer jerked away from his embrace of cap-and-trade, in an interview with the Great Falls Tribune. “I'm not a proponent of a carbon cap-and-trade system,” he said. “I think that it tends to transfer a lot of wealth from consumers of electricity to utilities.”
About the Author
Paul Chesser is executive director for the American Tradition Institute and a senior fellow for the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives. The views he expresses do not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.
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Jim O'Brien| 8.3.09 @ 6:57AM
The depth of ignorance about this is astonishing. Ask almost anyone if he thinks "greenhouse gases" are bad, and he will respond with a knee-jerk "Yes". But in fact, greenhouse gases are essential to maintain the earth at its current temperature, warm enough for life as we know it. Most people don't even realize that a major greenhouse gas is water vapor. And most don't realize that CO2 is only present in the atmosphere in trace amounts - currently about 380 parts per million. The earth has gone through periods of warming and cooling for millions of years, before homo sapiens arrived, and long before cars and factories. Changes in cycles of the sun and the earth's orbit are the keys.
Yet Obama and his Socialist Party are willing to further wreck the economy based on pseudo-science. If Obama's Cap & Trade taxes are enacted, more businesses will leave and take millions of jobs with them. The average consumer will see his electric bill skyrocket. Cap & Trade, along with Obama's decision to let the Bush tax cuts expire, will result in a depression.
owyheewine| 8.3.09 @ 10:43AM
Schweitzer is the best used car salesman on the block. He'll tell you what you want to hear and convince you that he fervently believes what he says. A couple of years ago he was vigorously promoting coal gasification as the secret of secure energy. Montana is a very large producer of coal. The CO2 could be sequestered for only a few trillion dollars. Now lots of traditional natural gas is being discovered and produced in the whole Rocky Mountain area. Someone obviously took the Guv aside and explained to him the economics of Montana energy production.
Michael Tomlinson| 8.3.09 @ 12:42PM
"Flip-flopping Schweitzer" is a Democrat so being hypocritical and disingenuous is congenital. Anyone who trusts a Democrat deserves to be disappointed and confused.
To the paranoid and moronic Obama-like anti-Semite kiss my Israeli loving buttocks.
Marc Jeric| 8.3.09 @ 3:05PM
1) There was first in the 1970's the global cooling scam (see e.g. Newsweek April 28 1975 on the Internet); the government-paid scientists (90% of them are rejects of private enterprise) recommended to fight the new ice age by sending our war planes to cover the polar ice with soot in order to increase solar heat and so prevent crushing of New York skyscrapers by the new glaciers;
2) When that did not work we had the global warming hoax in the 1990's, proclaimed by mainly the same government-paid scientists (Dr. Hansen of the NOAA, for example); to prevent the massive heating, fires, flooding of coastal cities, disappearance of Florida, California, and Caribbean islands, massive hurricanes, global famine, and other catastrophic events we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies;
3) after 11 years of considerable cooling we are now faced with the climate change flimflam where whatever happens with our climate we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies; and why not our banks, car and insurance companies while we are at it. To prevent this catastrophe the best vehicle presumably is international agreements enforced by the United Nations world government.
As for the influence of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas: on a normal day the atmosphere contains 10,000 ppm (parts per million) of water vapor and about 300 ppm of carbon dioxide. The government-paid scientists say that an increase of 100 ppm of CO2 over the next 50 years will result in a catastrophic warming. The thermal absorptivity of water vapor is 4 times larger than that of carbon dioxide; it follows that the CO2 increase will increase the overall thermal absorptivity of the mixture by about 1/4 of one percent. The production of methane from livestock flatulence and the rotting swamps (called "wetlands" by the environmentalists) vastly surpasses the influence of human-produced CO2.
There is the Global Warming Petition Project (see Internet) where 31,478 US independent scientists declared that there is no anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming; of these 9,029 are scientists with PhD degrees. Our environmentalists tried to sabotage this effort by submiiting phony names with phoney degrees - and then claimed the whole effort by the Petition scientists was a fraud. It took us 3 years and a lot of private money to verify the credentials of all the signatories and clean up the Petition of those saboteurs. See also Manhattan Declaration with more such signatories, plus a large number of scientific groups from other countries who state the same.
I am one of these signatories, MS and PhD degrees from UCLA, with majors in thermodynamics and heat & mass transfer.
I think to fight this communist attempt to secure a permanent hold on power should not be fought on the narrow grounds of more taxes - that is the losing proposition; where about 50% of the population is on some kind of welfare we will always be outvoted. The battle should be fought and won on the firm scientific basis.
SCAM - HOAX - FLIMFLAM!!!
cnc| 8.3.09 @ 4:23PM
The whole problem could rapidly become moot. A company named General Fusion is getting some good press in the technical journals about a new method of nuclear fusion. If it works, still a big if but there are no apparent defects in the physics, it will do more to defang russia and cripple the middle east trouble makers than any political policy has.
jr| 8.3.09 @ 4:36PM
Yes there will be a health care program and cap and trade program in order for the socialists and communists to achieve their goals of free everything for the peasantry. There was never any doubt after "I won" was elected and the media fell at his feet.
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panic attacks| 12.28.10 @ 10:37AM
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