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K, gang, let’s start prepping for the Senate showdown and, hopefully, the crashing and oh- so- carbon- emitting burning of the cap and tax lunacy.  Let’s start in a chilly place that by rights should be one of the leading proponents of global warming.  Lord knows, the weather certainly could stand to get a wee bit warmer in Scotland.

But for reasons unfathomable by rational minds, Scotland has decided its proper role as a nation is to lead the lemmings off the global warming cliff.  It hails itself, claiming it has the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals – a 42 percent reduction by 2020 and a mind-numbingly stupid 80 percent slash by 2050. Just listen to Scotland’s Climate Minister (Climate Minister?! He should be filed on the spot! Have you seen Scotland’s climate? Disgusting!) says about it all:

Scotland can be proud of this bill, the most ambitious and comprehensive piece of climate change legislation anywhere in the world. As a country, we are leading global action and expect others to follow our lead as we look to the international summit in Copenhagen this December.

I bet it’s going to be bone-chillingly cold in Copenhagen this December – big global warming confab or not.

I bring all this up because in Scotland’s goals we see what’s ahead for a cap and tax America.

Get ready for hefty fines if your household doesn’t do its part. And heftier fines if your business doesn’t. That’s now the rule in Scotland.

Prepare yourself for the Greenshirts busting into your house in search of plastic bags, or forcing your corporation to drop its theft-resistant packaging for something more easy to steal. OK, they’re not yet breaking down doors in Scotland, but they are attacking plastic bags as heinous, anti-social tools of destruction, only slightly more acceptable than the dreaded product packaging.

To incentivize thrifty Scots to part with some of their cash to reduce their carbon footprints, the Scotish Parliament has approved a 50 pound reduction in a local tax.  That sounds exactly like Obama thinking.  Everyone who pitches in to save the planet gets a tax cut.  Never mind that you’ll spend a 500, or 1,000 or 10,000 pounds to insulate your quaint cottage or install solar – that 50-pound tax cut is exactly the sort of great incentive a big government control freak would come up with. And we have more than a few of those in DC.

Not all the Scots are buying it, of course.  Here’s university prof Dr. James Buckee attempting too late to interject some rationality into all this:

“As far as reducing emissions by 80 per cent, banning the internal combustion engine, and coal-fired power stations from Scotland would not get close to doing it. This is clearly unobtainable.

“More energy has been expended on finding ways to infringe on human activity than has gone into understanding the science.”

Heh.  Loved that.  And speaking of understanding the science, there was one heck of an article in Forbes the other day, Waxman-Markey Flunks the Math.  Math is the base of all science, so that’s bad news for the Warmies. Here we go with the basics:

In the U.S., electricity is produced from these sources. If you are reading this on a handheld and can’t read Wikipedia’s wonderful pie chart, here is the breakdown:

48.9% — Coal
20% — Natural Gas
19.3% — Nuclear
1.6% — Petroleum

Got that? A tick over 88% of U.S. electricity comes from three sources: coal, gas and nuclear. Petroleum brings the contribution of so-called “evil” energy–that is, energy that is carbon- or uranium-based–to almost 90%.

The remaining sources of U.S. electricity, the renewables, are, by comparison, tiny players:

7.1% — Hydroelectric
2.4% — Other Renewables
0.7% — Other

Hydroelectric accounts for 70% of renewable energy in America. But, of course, hydro is mostly tapped out. Almost every dam that could be built has been built. Ironically enough, political opposition to building more dams comes from the same crowd of tree huggers who oppose coal, gas and uranium.

Waxman-Markey is all about punitively taxing the energy sources that make up 90 percent of our electrical generation, in order to subsidize the 10 percent that’s renewable.  Well, really 3 percent if you don’t count hydroelectric generation, which isn’t targeted for big Waxman-Markey subsidies. The author then reveals what the bill is all about; not stopping global warming, but good ol’ politics as usual:

In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% or supply 10 million Americans with electricity. That’s enough juice for the people in Waxman’s Los Angeles County. Or, if you prefer, for Nancy Pelosi’s metro San Francisco plus Markey’s metro Boston.

Well, what about electricity for the other 295 million? You can’t get there from here with Waxman-Markey. At very best, solar, wind and cellulosic ethanol will make 20% contributions by 2025. The smart money would bet on 10%.

Besides, those nasty ol’ Devil fuels are doing very well on the technology front, advancing at a clip that rivals or surpasses gains made in alternative energy.  Engines are cleaner and more efficient, fuels burn hotter and cleaner, and extraction and processing technologies are greener than ever.

There simply is no reason for Waxman-Markey … except for power-grabbing and money-sucking.  But there is a great alternative, an absolutely brilliant alternative, promoted today by Doug Ross:

We start with the most useless government agencies we can find. The Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FCC and Amtrak. For the sake of argument, let’s say that together, they consume $250 billion a year.

Congress’ job? They would be required to cut spending for these ridiculous bureaucracies according to the following schedule (which I had a lot of fun creating — all numbers in billions).

2012 – $250
2013 – $210
2014 – $190
2015 – $160
2016  – $140
2017 – $120
2018 – $110
2019 – $100
2020 – $90
2021 – $75
2022 – $60
2023 – $50

Pay-cuts? Layoffs? Closing unnecessary facilities? Who gives a crap? That’s for them to figure out.

How do you like Cap-and-trade now, Democrats?

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emember the BTU Tax?  I didn’t, which caused me to make a mistake in my post yesterday, when I made this comment in response to this, from Obama’s Rose Garden shill for the Waxman-Markey energy tax, “We have been talking about this issue for decades, now is the time to finally act.”  I said:

“We’ve been talking about carbon taxes for decades?!”  Where does he get this stuff? How dumb does he think we are?  If you stretch the timeline rather aggressively, pressure to tax carbon began within the last ten years, and even then it was promoted only by a small group of whackos.

I forgot one particular whacko, Al Gore, who in 1993 – decades ago – tried to move a tax on energy – British Thermal Units, or BTUs,  through Congress.  Mea culpa.

Matt Dempsey, a GOP staffer at the Senate Energy & Public Works Committee brought me back into the light:

As the House prepares to vote on the largest tax increase in American history, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill, and as President Obama tries to persuade his House allies to vote for same, EPW Policy Beat took another trip down memory lane.  We landed in 1993 as the House was voting on the Al-Gore-backed BTU tax.  As we and others have stated before, the historical and political parallels between the BTU tax and Waxman-Markey are striking: members fearful that voting for an energy tax would have political repercussions at the ballot box; members fearful of voting for a bill that would then die in the Senate; members fearful that an energy tax would be regressive, harm consumers, destroy jobs and slow economic growth; members fearful of a man named Gore pushing an energy rationing scheme that harms the heartland; and Democratic congressional leaders and Administration officials (read: Gore) desperately searching for exemptions and last-minute deals to shore up support.  As the proverb goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As you know, because “we have been talking about this issue for decades,” the BTU tax did fail, as Clinton dropped the bill in the Senate, when it became clear it didn’t have enough Democratic support there. Many of the Dems who voted for it in the House found themselves scrambling to defend their votes, and many could not, losing their seats. And America was spared having to commit forced economic suicide at the hand of a radical environmentalist politician.

We don’t have to go back to 1993 for lessons on how bad Waxman-Markey is; we need only visit Spain today. As George Will pointed out in his column yesterday:

[Gabriel] Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration’s green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain’s torrential spending — no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources — on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada’s report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies — wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital. (European media regularly report “eco-corruption” leaving a “footprint of sleaze” — gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs elsewhere in Spain’s economy.

A GOP study found the same thing here in the U.S. – green jobs aren’t particularly high-paying, but require an average government subsidy of $100,000.

I attempted to engage some green-tinted lefties in a meaningful conversation on the topic yesterday on a  New Mexico political blog (I got there via a Twitter link, if you’re curious). I response to a guest column plea for a yes vote on Waxman-Markey, I wrote:

Ask yourself, which is melting faster, the ice caps or the economy? Hint: It’s the latter by far, and spiking all energy costs in at least the short- to mid-term will only deepen and lengthen the recession.

As for all those new clean energy jobs, you cannot count the jobs Waxman-Markey supposedly will open up unless you also count the jobs it will destroy in oil, gas and related sectors of the economy, where several million are employed.

Out of work New Mexicans will suffer through higher costs long before they get the benefit of any new green jobs, I’m afraid. Call your representatives and ask them to vote NO on Waxman-Markey.

That spawned a raft of responses, mostly negative, including one saying I sounded like an oil industry propagandist. I challenged them to find anything wrong with anything I said, but they didn’t even try.  Instead, they waxed on about all the jobs Waxman-Markey, or ACES as they refer to it lovingly, will create.  As I understand their argument it goes like this:

We would feel really good if we could get jobs in the green industry because the world is like dying, you know, and we’re so excited about it, we’d like everyone to pay more money for everything in order for us to get those jobs.

That’s what we’re up against folks: Ignorant self-interest.  And ignorant self-interest is what they’re really talking about when they say “money,” as in “money makes the world go ’round.”

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aced with stiff opposition to the first major platform of his campaign to come before a vote in Congress – the Waxman Markey screw the economy/appease the radical greens bill – President Obama has been forced to drop everything and dial for votes.

Robert “I’ve Just Got to Get a Message to You” Gibbs confirmed the prez is calling congressmen to hustle votes and told the huddled press today, “We know where we are, and I’d bet on the president.”  That means the vote is a lot closer than they’d like.

Obama also hustled up a quick bully pulpit event in the Rose Garden to deliver this, the best the golden-tongued one can come up with in support of his massive energy tax:

I know this is going to be a close vote [expectation management], in part because of the misinformation that is out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and our economic growth. ["Mis"-information that shall go unrebutted.]

But my call to those members of Congress who are still on the fence as well as to the American people is this [Who aren't on the fence - even Obama's core voting block opposes it!]: we cannot be afraid of the future, we can’t be prisoners of the past. [And we certainly can't ask questions about cost or effectiveness.]

We have been talking about this issue for decades, now is the time to finally act.

That last line deserves more than a mere bracket.  “We’ve been talking about carbon taxes for decades?!”  Where does he get this stuff? How dumb does he think we are?  If you stretch the timeline rather aggressively, pressure to tax carbon began within the last ten years, and even then it was promoted only by a small group of whackos.

Besides, even if the discussion had been going on that long, the only thing one could conclude from it is that the Dems have not been able to get their way thus far, due to overwhelming opposition to the proposition of adding massive society-wide cost increases in the name of unilateral tilting at the global warming windmill.

And why, pray tell, is now the time to act?  Just ask yourself this simple question: Which is melting faster, the economy or the planet? That one is so easy, even a Democrat can get it.

It’s not too late – sign the petition!

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ichael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus met while trying to save redwoods. Their Breakthrough Institute is funded by the leftist Nathan Cummings Foundation – but they understand who wrong Waxman-Markey is, and they’ve got a pretty good idea about how to encourage new energy technologies without destroying the good old economy.

In an NPR interview, they lay it out:

“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” [Shellenberger] asks …. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”

Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”

Shellenberger and Nordhaus support government investments in alternative energy – a new Manhattan or moon project, which is hardly a new idea, but they articulate their well-researched points well.

Shellenberger tells the [Institute's] interns that environmental groups — like the ones he used to work for — are going about it all wrong. By urging Congress to cast carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be controlled, he says, they will constantly swim against the tide of public opinion.

“We’re stuck in this kind of poor paradigm for dealing with climate change, this pollution paradigm,” he says, “not because environmentalists are failures, but actually because they were so successful. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the cap and trade on acid rain — these things worked really well.”

How refreshing to hear an environmentalist actually acknowledge that things are getting better, not worse – that existing levels of regulation have accomplished their goals.  I’m a free market guy, but even so, I have to acknowledge that government investment in technology works – it’s government control of the market and stomping on competition that I don’t like.  They explain the benefits of public investment:

“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”

He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.

And railroads. And rockets.

Of course, the hotheads are screaming that there’s not enough time, we have to act now, the world is melting and carbon dioxide is a terrible poison. These are largely the same people who condemned Bush’s “rush to war.”  Unfortunately, Waxman and Markey are staunchly set in the camp of the hysterics.  Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been in DC this week, trying to get more reasonable electeds to behave more reasonably.

I hope they succeed.  You can help.  Sign the petition.

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armers and agricultural organizations have submitted more than 400 comments, totalling 25,000 pages, to the Senate Ag Committee regarding the pending Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade legislation – and they’re not supportive of the “let’s destroy the economy and say we’re saving the planet” bill.

Even the American Farmers Union, a haven for ag’s left-wingers, called for ag offsets and exclusions – in other words, stick the other folks with it if you must, but leave us out of it.

Here’s some decidedly negative comments from the Dairy Farmers of America, who have need to be particularly concerned because Waxman, Markey and the rest of the loons are fixated on cow farts as a heinous planet-destroyer.

“At this time, Dairy Farmers of America, Inc. (DFA) is reluctant to embrace any type of climate change legislation without a better understanding of its impact on the entire U.S. economy and specifically, the dairy industry. Should the U.S. enter into a system where it effectively reduces its greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in the aggregate, it must also work to ensure that other industrialized nations agree to similar terms and developing nations adopt equally significant reductions. The U.S. needs to ensure that the costs of any climate change legislation do not exceed the benefits, that new regulations are based on sound science and that the global burden is fairly distributed.

“We are especially cautious of mandatory GHG measures without a more complete and thorough understanding by all the major affected U.S. parties as to what these changes would mean for their incomes, businesses, livelihoods and ways of life. This is especially the case given the depths and extent of the nation’s current economic crisis whose negative effects are all too immediate and from which we have yet to see an end…

“DFA is also concerned about the ramifications of a cap-and-trade system on the entire, currently fragile U.S. economy, even though a carbon offset program might offer some incentives for dairy farmers to continue to pursue innovations and gain the market benefits as a result.”

Waxman and Markey will have none of that! Cost-benefit analyses? Consider the sorry state of the economy? Acknowledge China and India? What are those yahoos from dairyland thinking?! 

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