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June 1, 2009

Cap-and-trade: 'All cost, no benefit'

Topics: Global Warming, Political News and commentaries

Jennifer Rubin writes on the pass-through of the permit cost in higher consumer prices from the Democrats' cap-and-trade system to reduce the production of CO2 in the United States - a cost estimated by Martin Feldstein in his piece titled Cap-and-Trade: All Cost, No Benefit to be $1,600 per family, others have it at nearly $4,000:

[...] But whichever figure you prefer, the outcome is the same: for the sake of some feel-good and ultimately nonsensical restriction on just our share of CO2 output, the Obama administration and a segment of Congress would willingly throw the economy into a tizzy, raise taxes on Americans (that's what the "revenue generation" form cap-and-trade is, after all), and set the government up as the uber-watchdog over all industrial output. This is, quite frankly, the largest power grab by the government in recent memory.

Lawmakers of both parties are wary for good reasons. As we enter the era of car-company nationalization, government control of executive compensation, and unprecedented spending and taxation, one has to wonder whether cap-and-trade is a bridge too far, even for this president and Congress.

"A bridge too far," indeed. Those "feel-good and ultimately nonsensical restrictions" by the Obama administration and some of the Democrats in Congress that Jennifer speaks of are trully "all cost and no benefit." And as Feldstein suggests in his article (see above link), with the passing of the Waxman-Markey bill that was recently passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Americans need to ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. The time to make their feelings known to their politicians in Congress is short.

We don't need the government to become more of an "uber-watchdog" over "every aspect of our lives," as Nancy Pelosi suggests in regard to controlling CO2, at what amounts to great cost to every family with virtually no benefit to the planet. Especially since, as Christopher Booker's and Richard Norththe's piece in the Telegraph suggests, this global warming deceit is likely to turn out to have been a scare like all the others, and represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded.

Related:
15 Common Misconceptions About Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change


Global Climate Cooling Facts

Posted by Richard at June 1, 2009 10:26 AM

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