March 20th 2009
Feeling Chilly About Cap And Trade
W
all Street was down today but eked out its first positive week in quite some time - but don’t look for a continuation Monday as, first, the Congressional Budget Office said today Obamarx’s budget will produce losses $2.3 TRILLION worse than the White House predicts ($9.3 trillion worth from 2010-2019) and second, that the Obamarxists say damn the torpedoed economy, they’re not going to cut a single program.
Included in the programs they’re not about to cut is their greenhouse gas cap and trade program, which received endorsement of a Discovery Channel feature on alternative energy Incredible Wife and I watched this week. With every single new technology they showed, someone looked earnestly into the camera and said:
“We need carbon emission cap and trade for this to work. Without that financial incentive, this technology is just an overpriced waste of time and money.”
Or something to that effect. Translation: Unless the fuels you use get crazy expensive, you’d never be crazy enough to use the fuels the Greenies want you to use. The price tag of this little incentive program for clean energy?
President Obama’s climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House’s initial estimate of the so-called “cap-and-trade” legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House.
A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president’s climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.
“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that’s a big number,’” said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides. (WashTimes)
How reassuring do you find it that they had no clue what the program was going to cost? But so what? Who cares? Obamarx says larger deficits and larger than expected costs for his programs mean nothing to him.
“What we will not cut are investments that will lead to real growth and prosperity over the long term. That’s why our budget … enhances America’s competitiveness by reducing our dependence on foreign oil and building a clean energy economy.”
Enhances competitiveness by making everything we make, everything we grow, more expensive? Please explain - without a teleprompter - how that works.
But no matter. Whether we want to do it or not, we have to do it to save the fragile planet, which without alternative energy and an end to greenhouse gas over-emitting, will soon be awash in seawater from rising oceans. Riiiiight …
How many times have you seen the word “collapse” used lately to describe what could unfold should human-caused global warming, and more particularly warming seas, erode the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? (One metric: A Google search for “West Antarctic Ice Sheet” and “collapse” gets 29,800 hits.)
The word is used again in the headline on one of two new papers in the journal Nature focusing on past comings and goings of that huge expanse of ice. But this paper, by David Pollard at Penn State and Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, provides an estimated time frame for the loss of ice that its authors say should be of some comfort. (If the sheet melted entirely, sea levels worldwide would rise more than 15 feet.)
Dr. Pollard and Dr. DeConto ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet’s comings and goings, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns.
The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process — at its fastest — takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn’t go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said …. (NYT)
That’s less than a quarter inch a year - the same amount the ocean’s been rising for the last 100,000 20,000 years or so [corrected], more than 19,800 years before human involvement (what a joke!) in our climate. And in case you missed that attribution, folks, it says NYT, as in the New York Times - hardly a bastion of anti-Warmie journalism.
Yet Obamarx marches on with his scheme of cap and trade, despite the damage it will do to an economy that is far more stretched and fragile than he admits, despite the fact that there is no immediate threat from global warming. There’s a word for that. Demagoguery.
We may have a horrible government, but we’ve got a beautiful language.
Hat-tip: Jim. Art: Minnesotans for Global Warming
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Posted in Cap and trade, Economic Policy, Obama | 5 Comments » | 
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March 20th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Let’s think about this a bit. The whole premise of this “cap and trade” idea is that we have a “free market” in CO2 emissions (something which actually has no value in the free market, but…). Supposedly somebody with a nice, new, green power plant would sell the CO2 they’re not emitting to somebody still running one of the 90% of power plants that emit CO2. OK, pricey, but a fair exchange, and a “driver” to get people to build the more “green” power plants (unless it’s nuclear, then all bets are off).
OK, so how is it that this free market exchange between private entitiies, on the side, generates $2 trillion in revenue for the government?
March 20th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Yessiree. However it does it, fees on transactions or taxes on transactions, $2 trillion comes out to about $8,000 a year in new costs - taxes - for every man, woman and child in the U.S. And that’s assuming the taxed carbon emitters pass on the fee/tax without mark-up.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:14 am
Obamarx definitely. Karl, Groucho or both?
March 21st, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 to 12,000 years or so, not 100,000 years. The sea level has risen over 400 feet in that time.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Yes - sorry for the error - I can’t trust the top of my head when it comes to numbers; I’ve got poor number memory. The last glacial maximum was about 21,000 years ago and oceans started rising as the glaciers began melting, picking up steam 14,000 years ago.