Ain’t happy with cap ‘n trade.
For all its “green” aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like “cap-and-trade” scheme. Here are a few of the bill’s egregious flaws:
- It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
- It sets meager targets — 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year’s level — and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious “offsets,” by which other nations are paid to preserve forests – while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
- Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, “has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives.”
- It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, “businesses and households won’t be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense,” thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,how was the play?
Of course, Hansen is happy to have legislation that would destroy the economy. But at least he actually would like the result to be lower emissions. The Democrats seem to be committed to impoverishing America for the fun of it. As long as taxes go up and there’s more money to hand out to the usual interest groups, why worry?
