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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?

A 15-Year-Old on Global Warming
April 10, 2009

Transcript from Rush Limbaugh show

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Who’s next? Alyssa, a 15-year-old from Holdingford, Minnesota. Is that right? Nice to have you on the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks. I was going to tell you about a conference about cap and trade that I went to at St. Cloud State, Minnesota, and –

RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute here, Alyssa. You’re 15.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: How did you end up going to a cap-and-trade seminar?

CALLER: My dad got a couple of e-mails about it from Michele Bachmann, and I really wanted to learn more about it.

RUSH: Oh, okay, so Michele Bachmann is your congresswoman?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And so she did a town meeting seminar on cap and trade?

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: Oh, oh, oh, okay. So your dad wanted to know about it, he took you.

CALLER: He took me and one of his friends.

RUSH: All right, so did you know what cap and trade was before the seminar?

CALLER: A little bit.

RUSH: Do you know more about it now?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: And…?

CALLER: I was going to tell you about the liberals that were there.

RUSH: Oh, good. I love hearing about liberals at seminars.

CALLER: They were actually really rude there, and they had to be talked to by security a couple times.

RUSH: You mean they were disrupting Congresswoman Bachmann?

CALLER: And Chris Horner. Chris Horner was the one that was talking about it.

RUSH: Okay. These are probably community organizers like ACORN, the same kind of people that are the pirates.

CALLER: Yes. And they were screaming questions, and we got these cards that we had to fill out questions on, and instead of that they were screaming them out. And then they asked about green jobs, and he asked them to name a couple of them, and they just shut up after that.

RUSH: Yeah, a green job is a myth. What is a green job? They didn’t have an answer for it?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: What is a green job? How much you make doing a green job?

CALLER: There is no such thing.

RUSH: A landscaper is a green job. You work around things that are green: Grass, weeds, flowers, plants, that sort of thing.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Well, I’m glad that you got to see this. Was this the first time that you had seen in person this kind of rude behavior from liberals?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: How did it make you feel?

CALLER: I was actually really mad at them.

RUSH: Were you scared at all?

CALLER: Not really.

RUSH: You were just mad?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Did they try to shut down the seminar? Did they succeed in doing that?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: How many of them were there?

CALLER: I think there were about 2,000 people there, and there were probably maybe 20 of them.

RUSH: Twenty agitators, 20 community organizers showed up –

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: — to try to disrupt the thing, but they failed, essentially?

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: Now, you knew that this was liberal behavior before you went there, you just had never seen it in person?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Seeing it in person has a much more powerful impact than just watching it on television. Watching it on television, you’re not really there. You see it on TV so much, it doesn’t have any impact. But when you’re there, like you were, profound impact. Well, that is pretty much standard operating behavior for American libs. Well, it is, Snerdley. People think I’m going to be misleading this young girl, but I’m not. They’re constantly mad; they’re constantly angry; they don’t want to debate whatever is being debated. They want to shut down any discussion of a position that’s not theirs, because they’re afraid that the 2,000 people there were going to be persuaded to agree with a concept that they don’t agree with. So, rather than debate it, they wanted to shut it down. This is how they operate. It’s intimidation. These people were probably paid, too.

CALLER: Most of them looked like they were college students.

RUSH: Yeah. I’m sure they’re just saving up money for the next party, kegger, whatever. Well, good, how did it end up? Did the seminar end up being okay and you learned more about it than you knew before you went in?

CALLER: Yeah, I learned a lot, actually.

RUSH: Is there one thing that stood out that you learned?

CALLER: The global cooling that they talked about like a couple years back when my dad was in school, and there was global warming that was way worse before, the earth fluctuates in temperature.

RUSH: Yeah. That’s right. By the way, your dad was in school more than two years ago, I hope.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: ‘Cause you’re talking about the covers of Newsweek and TIME Magazine back in 1979. They were talking about the coming ice back then. I want to give you, Alyssa, a closing thought that will help you to understand liberals even more. Let’s take the global warming debate, and this has to do with what I call the vanity and the total lack of humility that these people have. The earth is billions of years old. The earth, as you learned, has gone through cycles of heat and cooling, warmth and freezing, that are beyond the ability of any earthly creature, human or otherwise, to influence. We can influence our environment, we have air-conditioning and heat. But we can’t change the climate, we never have been able to. But for some reason, throughout all these billions of years, the last 20 or 30, which are so microscopic a grain of sand does not represent the size of the last 30 years in just a hundred years. I mean we are so infinitesimal a part of this planet, yet the last 30 years all of these people, Alyssa, say that everything that is now is normal. The level of ice, the temperatures, average temperatures around the world, the amount of rainfall, cloud cover, everything now is what is normal, and any variation is a disaster.

Any variation or trend toward any variation is a disaster. Now, what kind of arrogance does it require for a living human being to think that in the full breadth and scope of world history, that their little irrelevant period of time on it is the way it’s always been or is even optimum and the best? The world is constantly moving and shaping. Your dad someday is going to take you to the Grand Canyon. Your dad someday is going to take you to Arizona, and you’re going to see big mountains, and you’re going to learn, you’re going to see lines and scales all up and down the sides of the canyons and you’re going to be told that what you’re looking at used to be thousands of feet under water, and what you’re looking at is sediment lines. And you look up, and it’s thousands of feet in the air, hundreds of feet in the air. What? Under water? And then you’re going to ask yourself how in the world could I have seen to it that all these rocks that were under water somehow became mountains on the surface? You couldn’t have done it. It’s just happened, and that’s how the climate operates. You got a great head start thanks to your dad taking you to this thing. It’s great that he did. Alyssa, thanks for the call. Appreciate it.

END TRANSCRIPT

When I first eyeballed the 648-page draft cap-and-trade bill, authored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), I was perplexed, even stunned.

Secs. 831-834 of the draft bill exempt carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases from regulation under the Clean Air Act’s (CAA) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program, Hazardous Air Pollutant (HAP) program, New Source Review (NSR) pre-construction permitting programs, and Title V operating permits program.

This surprised me for two reasons.

First, it is tacit admission that free-market and industry analysts were correct when they warned that EPA could not control the cascading effects of CAA regulation of CO2 once it starts. It is implicit confirmation of our view that the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision set the stage for an economy-choking regulatory morass.

What a difference one presidential election can make! Back in July 2008, Waxman and Markey bashed Bush’s EPA for responding to Mass v. EPA by issuing an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR). EPA’s purpose was to inform and solicit public comment on the administrative, legal, and economic repercussions of greenhouse gas regulation under the CAA. Waxman denounced the ANPR as “a transparent delaying tactic.” Markey called it a ”shameful display of political interference with potential regulation of global warming pollution.” They demanded that EPA simply declare ”global warming pollution” a menace to society, and propose regulations to combat it.

Yet today, Waxman and Markey are peddling legislation that would exempt greenhouse gases from several CAA regulatory authorities. It’s as if they actually learned something from the ANPR and the comments free-market and industry analysts submitted to EPA spotlighting the perils of CO2 regulation under the CAA.

Or maybe they knew all along that Mass v. EPA created a Pandora’s Box, pretending otherwise gave them another stick to beat Bush with, but now that Obama is in the hot seat, they have to sober up and avoid a politically-damaging regulatory debacle.

Whatever their reasoning, I was also surprised by Secs. 831-834, because the provisions seemed so contrary to the economic interest the eco-litigation “community.”

For example, if EPA establishes greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles–the explicit policy objective of petitioners in Mass v. EPA–an estimated 1.2 million previously unregulated entities (office buildings, big box stores, enclosed malls, hotels, apartment buildings, even commercial restaurants) would become “major stationary sources” of CO2. As such, those facilities would be vulnerable to new regulation, monitoring, paperwork, penalties, and litigation under the NSR pre-construction permitting programs. Applying NSR to CO2 would produce a surge in NIMBY (”Not In My Backyard”) lawsuits. Construction jobs and economic development would plummet, but “green jobs” for trial lawyers would soar.

Why would Waxman and Markey deny a full-employment program to  the eco-trial bar? This puzzled me. Until yesterday, that is, when I read a blog post by Matt Dempsey of Senator Inhofe’s Senate Environment Public Works Committee staff. As Dempsey explains, the draft bill would dramatically expand “citizen suit” provisions under the CAA:

Over the next few days, EPW PolicyBeat will focus on the Waxman-Markey draft climate change legislation and several of the most interesting provisions therein. In our view, Section 336 is far and away the most interesting in the 648-page bill. Here the authors amend the citizen suit provision in Section 304 of the Clean Air Act. The Waxman-Markey bill authorizes a “person” to “commence an action” who has “suffered, or reasonably expects to suffer, a harm attributable, in whole or in part, to a violation or failure to act referred to in subsection (a).” Sounds innocuous enough…until one reads on. For then one discovers how “harm” is defined: “For purposes of this section, the term ‘harm’ includes any effect of air pollution (including climate change), currently occurring or at risk of occurring, and the incremental exacerbation of any such effect or risk that is associated with a small incremental emission of any air pollutant (including any greenhouse gas defined in Title VII), whether or not the risk is widely shared.” In other words, should the unfortunate happen and Waxman-Markey become law, courts could conceivably be flooded with lawsuits filed by environmental groups who perceive some risk—and they undoubtedly will perceive it—that is “associated with a small incremental emission” of a greenhouse gas—whether from a coal-fired power plant, a manufacturing facility, or some other entity covered by the bill. This provision will further empower the eco-trial bar to fight the ravages of climate change and the businesses it dislikes, with no effect on the former and disastrous consequences for the latter.

So there you have it. What the left hand taketh away, the other left hand restoreth. Secs. 831-834 appear to shield businesses from litigation-driven regulation under the CAA, but this is a slight-of-hand. Sec. 336 would open up a whole new field of climate-related regulatory litigation.

The Waxman-Markey draft bill is tricky in at least one other respect. Although it precludes regulation under the aforementioned CAA programs, it does not preclude regulation under CAA Sec. 111, the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) program. Anyone who reads the ANPR can see that EPA staff are hot to propose greenhouse gas performance standards for coal-fired power plants, petroleum refineries, and other large industrial facilities.

Although the greenhouse gas performance standards, as envisioned in the ANPR, would mostly require “process efficiency” upgrades, eco-litigation groups entertain much bigger ambitions. Last November, Sierra Club climate council David Bookbinder advocated using NSPS to block construction of new coal-fired power plants and, in time, shut down existing coal plants:

So what next?  Logically, I think the answer is New Source Performance Standards for fossil-fuel fired power plants.  Just such a rulemaking is sitting in limbo at EPA and it is the appropriate vehicle for limiting new power plant emissions to 800 lb. CO2/MWh.  This would permit new gas-fired plants but would effectively stop any new coal-fired ones that did not employ carbon capture and sequestration (”CCS”).  Perhaps this rulemaking could also contain a second phase, effective 2016 or so, tightening the standard to approximately 250 lb. CO2/MWh.  This would be achievable via either combined gas/solar or gas/wind generation or 90% CCS.  And then they could start thinking about how to deal with existing power plants under Section 111(d) of the Act.  But one thing at a time.

Since coal provides about 50% of all U.S. electric power, an agenda that aims to suppress or even kill off coal generation in a decade or so should worry anyone who worries about the economy (and who doesn’t worry about the economy these days!).

To sum up, the Markey-Waxman bill leaves intact the NSPS threat to our electric supply system. It would create a new launchpad for litigation based on the perceived environmental risks of “small incremental” emissions. Any “regulatory certainty” it appears to offer is illusory.

The bad economy is helping global warming alarmists accomplish their goal of reduced greenhouse gas emissions, says USA Today:

From the United States to Europe to China, the global economic crisis has forced offices to close and factories to cut back. That means less use of fossil fuels such as coal to make energy. Fossil-fuel burning, which creates carbon dioxide, is the primary human contributor to global warming.

A recession-driven drop in emissions “is good for the environment,” says Emilie Mazzacurati of Point Carbon, an energy research company. “In the long term, that’s not how we want to reduce emissions.”

Whether the warmers want to acknowledge it or not, a recessionary economy is how they want to reduce emissions. Whether you limit inexpensive, efficient energy usage or you tax it, you raise costs and therefore inhibit consumption and growth.

Bonus journalistic boner observation #1 from the USA Today article: Reporter Traci Watson writes, “As carbon dioxide builds in the atmosphere, it traps heat and warms the Earth. The result: melting glaciers, rising seas and fiercer droughts.” Why hasn’t that been the case in this decade, Traci?

Bonus journalistic boner observation #2 from the USA Today article: Traci sez, “European nations face a 2012 deadline to cut their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, a global-warming treaty written in 1997 and renounced by President George W. Bush in 2001.” Why jump to 2001, Trace? What about the Clinton administration (never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification) and the U.S. Senate (who voted unanimously that they would not support ratification)?