A PRIMER

“Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.”–Pres. Ronald Reagan

What is “Cap and Trade”?

It is a lie. But not just a lie. It is also theft, socialism, dirt-worship. Big Government, extremism, impoverishment, fantasy and disempowerment.

Cap and Trade is a gargantuan regressive tax and oppressive regulatory scheme of energy rationing. It forces businesses to buy permission slips from a “central authority” to both create and then use energy, a double tax.

Why not just call it an Energy Tax? Because taxes are unpopular. It’s called “Cap and Trade” because “Tax and Regulate” is too honest. It is touted as a free market solution to pollution…if by “free” we mean mandatory and by “market” we mean “government”.

Once businesses are forced to buy these energy-rationing coupons or permission slips to create jobs, those slips will have value, not unlike a liquor license. Although they really have no value in and of themselves, businesses would then be unwilling to repeal this tax and lose their investment. And it would be woven into treaties, making it difficult to ever again regain our sovereignty, thus disempowering Americans.

Why do all this? Well, first, I’ll give you the stated purpose; to lower carbon dioxide levels, the gas you exhale, and therefore lower the Earth’s thermostat by a degree or two.

That is madness. We do not control the weather, despite the God-sized egos in Washington DC.

The very premise of this scheme is dubious at best. It is still doubtful that Global Warming even exists. It is therefore doubtful carbon dioxide causes it. And it is extremely doubtful that this system would even help in any case.

Man-Made Global Warming is not just science fiction–it’s L. Ron Hubbard Jumping-on-Oprah’s-Couch Brand(tm) Science Fiction, wrapped in Weapons-Grade Wishful Thinking, inside an Old-Growth Fantasy Forest.

This is a bottomless financial rat-hole, an infinite money-pit which will not alter the Earth’s temperature one iota. But it will stifle business, kill jobs, raise prices on everything and transfer power and control of our economy to politicians in Washington and UN bureaucrats in New York.

And that is it’s real purpose–the process is the punishment. Transferring control of our economy to bureaucrats is the real purpose of Cap and Trade. It’s all about money, power and control; the Environment is just the hook used to sell it.

In an unguarded moment during the campaign, Obama promised that Cap and Trade would “skyrocket” your power bill.

The Bad News: he was right. The Good News? He’s finally keeping a promise!

It would be bad enough to do this in boom times. But to do this when our economy is struggling to get off its knees borders on the criminal–or at least, the criminally insane.

Nor does the technology exist:

“When the acid rain cap-and-trade system was added to the Clean Air Act, the technology to reduce sulfur dioxide was already in commercial use.

There’s nothing comparable for carbon dioxide. The method, known as carbon capture and sequestration, is still in development. Carbon storage, as it’s also called, “requires capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and other industrial facilities, transporting it to suitable locations, injecting it into deep underground geological formations, and monitoring its behavior,” according to the World Resources Institute.

There’s no clear evidence that carbon capture and sequestration will be ready for full-scale commercial use 10 years from now. Without this technology, the goals outlined by McCain and those included in the Lieberman-Warner bill cannot be accomplished.”

My wife has a carbon sequestration device I can sell to the government. it’s called a “frying pan”. You know that Ronnie Milsap song “She Keeps the Home Fires Burning”? Well, she keeps the home fries burning. But I wouldn’t cap or trade her.

Sequestration sounds like another Yucca Mountain moment–30 years of gridlock.

If past performance is any guide, those much-vaunted “green jobs” will cost the taxpayers a million dollars to produce a single $100,000 paycheck. But Cap and Trade will certainly throw thousands of other workers out of work.

It will also require a brand new bureaucracy bigger than the EPA just to keep track of all this. After all, the biggest fan of Cap and Trade was Ken Lay. This will be Ecology and Economics by Enron(tm):

“In fact, European efforts have racked up significant costs while failing to reduce emissions.

Nearly every European country participating has higher emissions today than when the treaty was first signed in 1997. Further, despite ongoing criticism of the United States from Kyoto parties for failing to ratify the treaty, emissions in many of these nations are actually rising faster than in the United States.”

Other countries absolutely refuse to cripple their own economies out of moral vanity. Nor do countries finally disenthralled and freed of communism wish to return to it, even if we call it by a shiny new name.

The only thing not in doubt is that this will cost each of us everytime we touch a light switch or try to start a new business. But Big Government, whether the Feds or the UN, will be firmly in control of economies, despite their perfect record of dismal failure there.

As the Detroit News put it today

Cap-and-trade plan will sink Michigan

President Barack Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions is a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation’s heartland — particularly Michigan. It is a multibillion-dollar tax hike on everything that Michigan does, including making things, driving cars and burning coal. …
The only upside is that the negative impact it will have on economic growth and job creation will take care of the carbon emissions problem, for sure.

Cap and Trade is designed to fix one problem and one problem only:

the problem that Socialists have with Small Government, Free Markets and Your Liberty.