April 2009

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety earlier this week reported how smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles are less safe than larger vehicles, and my John Locke Foundation colleague Roy Cordato noted how well it fits the policy prescriptions of global warming alarmists:

I guess maybe that’s why the greens like these cars. Not only do they reduce atmospheric CO2 but they help cut down on the surplus population.

Lest you think that’s an exaggeration, just read for yourself about the population control (i.e., abortion) funding efforts of wealthy environmental activist foundations such as the Turner Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and others. Or you could read about it at the Acton Institute site.

Let’s not forget on this day that government has worked out a lot more ways to appropriate your money than income tax.  Sales Tax is the one we come across most often, but at least it’s out in the open and you see it being added to every purchase you make (an example of tax transparency not enjoyed by most of the world).  It is the hidden taxes – the “stealth taxes” – that are perhaps an even bigger problem.  When government taxes a particular activity, often at the source, so that costs are passed on to the end consumer – you and me – without us appreciating it, then government has acheived revenue without responsibility.

That is why “cap and trade,” the fashionable measure for imposing fees on emitters of greenhouse gases, is such an insidious idea.  Ostensibly, the fees would provide a ‘market-based’ incentive for emitters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  In practice, it would raise energy prices, as both President Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman (D. – Hollywood Millionaires) have admitted.  Thankfully, the vast majority of Senators have realized that cap-and-trade is a tax, which is why on April 1 they passed by the margin of 98-0 an amendment to the budget “To protect middle-income taxpayers from tax increases by providing a point of order against legislation that increase taxes on them, including taxes that arise, directly or indirectly, from Federal revenues derived from climate change or similar legislation.”  That amendment essentially recognizes cap-and-trade as a stealth tax, one that Americans for Tax Reform have calculated as amounting to $3000 for each family.

So where does this leave us?  The EPA is announcing that they will hold a knife to the nation’s throat if this tax doesn’t get passed.  There’s responsible government for you!  The intelligent environmentalists at The Breakthrough Institute recognize the folly of this strategy, but, sad to say, intelligent voices in the environmentalist movement are very rarely listened to.

In the face of this assault of Green Taxes, there may be no alternative but to hold a Green Tea Party.  Watch this space.

Spokesmanship Is Bliss
Chris Horner, American Spectator Blog, 15 April 2009

Several outlets have now picked up on Spanish economic professor Dr. Gabriel Calzada’s study of the economic impacts of Spain’s “green jobs” schemes touted by President Obama as our model to follow.

Beware the Geeks that Bring You Climate Policies
Michael Barone, DC Examiner, 15 April 2009

Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That’s the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The “quants” who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.

Obama’s Clobber and Trade
Peter Sapp, Pittsburgh Tribune Review. 13 April 2009

Global warming and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are what former Vice President Al Gore calls “inconvenient truths.” But where they end, the guesswork begins.

Cap-and-Trade: Disaster Waiting To Happen
Terry Easton, Human Events, 14 April 2009

Heard of so-called “global warming”? It’s been shown to be another socialist scam to create massive government controls over a “crisis” which doesn’t exist. But, as Rom Emanuel, President Obama’s closest advisor has said, good socialists “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Especially if its imaginary.

Beware of Climate Conformity
Paul Sheehan, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 2009

The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology. “But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis.”

John Andrews, director of The Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, has checked in with a report about the debate last week between “Red Hot Lies” author Chris Horner and climatologist James White. Andrews says that despite an audience that far exceeded the auditorium’s capacity of 300, the Denver-area media (not surprisingly) ignored the event:

For example, editors at Channel 7 for some reason didn’t feel this fit their upcoming series on green issues, while Denver Post environment reporter Mark Jaffe told me archly that Horner’s presence made this occasion “not a debate… not news.”

But CCU and the Centennial Institute shrugged off the snub.  As I pointed out to Jaffe, our two nationally-known experts on climate science and climate policy seemed to think it was a debate.  So did a century-old local university.  So did our capacity crowd of several hundred open-minded Coloradans.  If the MSM choose to be close-minded about this, it’s really their problem, not ours.

Didn’t a major newspaper just close in Denver?

Meanwhile, I hope these little events (like the recent one between John Christy and William Schlesinger) will continue and then the public will benefit from all perspectives on the issue.

Cap-and-Trade Hurts Little Guy, Aids the Corrupt
William O’ Keefe, U.S. News & World Report, 14 April 2009

The American people have had enough of convoluted, indecipherable financial schemes and the opportunists who exploit them. The public is understandably angry about Wall Street’s exploitation of Main Street, and yet our political leaders are setting the stage for another complex trading market, ripe for corruption. The future Enrons and Bernie Madoffs of the world would like nothing better than to see the U.S. impose a new market for carbon emission trading.

Where’s the Benefit?
Paul Chesser, Spectator, 14 April 2009

Global warming realists (that is, those who don’t buy the Al Gore-like catastrophism because they see the earth is  no warmer than it was 12 years ago) often argue  against various forms of energy taxes, but too many stop short of asking alarmists, “What’s the benefit?”

Cap-and-Trade a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Senator John Ensign, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 13 April 2009

President Barack Obama has been shockingly upfront about his heavy-handed plans to govern energy production across the country from Washington, D.C. His plan is known as cap-and-trade, but it amounts to a new national energy tax that will be detrimental to consumers’ pocketbooks at the worst possible time.

When I wrote Red Hot Lies, I backed up the claim with specifics and evidence. Sadly if typically, a new talking point has emerged among the cap-n-trade cheerleading Left – which as I showed at two town hall meetings with Rep. Michele Bachmann last Thursday excludes the non-financially financially vested Left, to their credit.

At both meetings the press – whose penetrating questions beforehand were restricted to “Who’s paying for your trip out here?” (Bill McAuliffe, Minneapolis Star Tribune…it was that mean old Young America’s Foundation) – and the Alinskyites in the audience at one session clinged like grim death to a supposed life raft in the sea of red ink, “an MIT study on cap and trade” disputing certain cost estimates for such a scheme.

Today I see the Huffington Post repeats the claim that Rep. Bachmann was lying about the cost… without saying what the lie was, or otherwise backing up the language. Some person denies cost projections about a scheme designed to price energy out of current levels of use, somehow making anyone else who projects cost estimates a “liar”, which is pushed as the take away point in coverage and public discourse.

OK, usual playground logic, ad hom and subject-changing, shocked shocked, and all that, but here’s the test:

Is Barack Obama lying?

Numerous cost estimates, all projections of the future, are floating around about what a cap-and-trade bill would cost. It is a fool’s errand to bother claiming to know which is most representative – one I lapsed into in q-n-a once, I admit, by offering a range of projections (and an audience member shouted “Lie!”…no, it’s actually a range of projections). A principal reason this is a time-waster is that the Waxman-Markey bill, “the” game in town right now, cleverly avoided assigning specifics to their scheme, thereby ensuring all potential recipients of its rents will pant after the project in hopes that it is they whose beak gets wetted at the expense of the economy.

So, again, the question is whether the man pushing this scheme, the man whose political vanity or social engineering dreams it is to satisfy, is lying?

The only relevant estimate of cap-and-trade legislation is that it would cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket“.

That’s Obama.

Hey, Left, stop changing the subject and answer the question: Is Obama Lying?