Cap & Trade - Back To The Future

Assume Obama's cap and trade bill is enacted and destroys enough of our economy that we actually meet the Waxman-Markey goals for a massive reduction in our nation's carbon footprint. What will be the ramifications? This from Rep. Joel Barton (R-TX), answers the question:

. . .Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That's the last time Americans' carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation.

. . . In that case you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO2 emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America's to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO2 level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that has actually achieved it is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. So excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Just why anyone beyond reliably liberal politicians and environmental activists would support cap-and-trade is getting harder to understand. . . .

I can answer that - its a mix of anti-capitalist ultra-libs who want to live in the Garden of Eden, secularists who have embraced the green agenda as a substitute religion, cynical far left politicians who see in control of carbon a back door that will allow massive expansion of government power, and business minded folk who are set to make a killing under such a regime. GE, Al Gore, Duke Power, all are set in one form or another to make windfall profits. Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to get screwed on a royal scale.

Rep. Barton continues, discussing how no one, not even the White House, has been able to come up with a reasonable estimate on what the real costs of this legislation will be:

Without actual numbers or the resulting cost estimates, we're left to ponder the broad ranges of economic damage. The news is necessarily vague, but none of it is good. Your electricity bill will increase by 77 percent to 129 percent. Filling up your gas tank will cost anywhere from 60 percent to 144 percent more. The cost of home heating oil and natural gas will nearly double.

Do you think the above estimate will help the economy or hurt it? Most would answer that it will hurt, and cost millions of Americans jobs.

If Democrats manage to pass a cap-and-trade fiasco, millions of lost American jobs will likely pop up overseas. Already the recession seems to get deeper by the day. Michigan has an unemployment rate of 12 percent. Indiana has a 10 percent unemployment rate. Ohio is at 9.7 percent. California and Georgia are both at 9.2 percent unemployment. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, a cap-and-trade law will cost 3 million to 4 million net jobs lost. The Heritage Foundation puts it between 1.8 million and 5.3 million, and Charles Rivers Associates estimated it as high as 7 million. Because there is so little protection for industry jobs that rely heavily on affordable and dependable baseload power, I think we can expect to start buying more Mexican cement, Chinese fertilizer and Indian steel.

Under the Waxman-Markey draft we are capping our economy and trading away our jobs. We are instituting a regressive energy tax on Americans already enduring high unemployment, lost 401(k)s, and rampant home foreclosures. . . .

Read the entire article. This really is insanity on steroids.