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2009
Can Big Brother be green? Absolutely. If carbon dioxide were the planetary poison that global warming alarmists claim, then every aspect of our lives would be fair game for government control: the homes we build, the cars we drive, the light bulbs we use. Even the number of children we have-because lets face it; any reduction in CO2 that we achieve will be more than offset by the households our kids will create when they grow up.
There are already proposals in Congress and federal agencies to vastly increase taxes and regulations in order to address the so-called global warming crisis. But as a growing number of scientists are openly declaring, there is no crisis.
To let Washington know that you don’t want them controlling access to energy, visit cei.org/1984 and send a letter to your Congressman today.
Obama’s proposed tax increases create a massive financial penalty for married couples, by subjecting them to much higher income taxes than if they had chosen to live together without getting married. (Unmarried people voted decisively for Obama. But as the Associated Press notes, “married people tend to favor” Republicans like McCain).
Under the tax increases contained in Obama’s recent budget proposals, a married couple making $232,000 a year would be in a higher tax bracket than many unmarried couples making $370,000 a year. Simply by getting married, a man and woman making $170,000 each would be pushed up from their current level of 28 percent to 36 percent. But an unmarried couple making $340,000 a year ($170,000 each) would be taxed at 28 percent. And a married couple making $380,000 would be taxed at 39.6 percent — not counting certain adjustments that bring the rate to 40.7 percent. (That’s just the federal standard rate. You have to add to that state income taxes (up to 10.3 percent), and federal self-employment taxes, which many small business owners pay — which could result in marginal rates of well over 60 percent).
Obama’s proposals impose tax increases on any single person making over $190,650. Worse, they increase taxes on all married couples making over $231,300 — even if each spouse only makes half of that, or $115,650, far less than the $190,650 that drives up the rate for singles.
These tax increases are breaches of Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 a year, which he earlier broke by signing into law the regressive SCHIP excise tax increase and by proposing a global-warming “cap-and-trade” energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion.
It’s part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.
Here is mega-accounting firm Deloitte’s summary of Obama’s tax increases:
“Tax increases, deduction limitations for high-income earners
Second, Obama’s budget outline delivers on several of his campaign promises to increase income taxes on higher-income individuals, including:
* Reinstating the top two individual income tax rates, currently 33 and 35 percent, at their pre-2001 levels – 36 and 39.6 percent – beginning in 2011. The 36 percent bracket would begin at taxable income of $190,650 for singles and $231,300 for married couples. While the budget proposal does not specifically indicate the taxable income level at which the 39.6 percent rate would apply, under current law for 2009, the highest tax bracket starts at $372,950 for singles and married couples. Presumably, this taxable income level would not likely change significantly for the new 39.6 percent bracket, although the Obama administration says the taxable income levels for this rate would “vary by filing status.” The 28 percent tax rate bracket would be expanded to reflect modifications to the upper limit of that bracket (where the 36 percent bracket would begin).
* Increasing the capital gains and dividends rate to 20 percent for taxpayers in 36 and 39.6 percent tax brackets. The reduced rates on gains on assets held over five years would be repealed. In both cases, the increased rates would apply beginning in 2011.
* Reinstating in 2011 the personal exemption phase-out and itemized deduction limitation, which are scheduled to be fully phased out starting in 2010. Phase-out thresholds would be $200,000 of adjusted gross income for singles and $250,000 for joint filers.In effect, the Obama budget would raise the top income tax rate, considering these phase-outs, to 40.79 percent.”
Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Joe Barton (R-TX) hits a home run in this oped, which says everything you need to know about the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill.
Doug Koplow of Earth Track, assisted by researchers with Friends of the Earth, has produced a new study, A Boon to Bad Biofuels, on the taxpayer cost of federal biofuel tax credits and mandates. The numbers are staggering.
In 2008, federal support for ethanol and biodiesel totalled more than $9.5 billion. The subsidy system has two main components:
- The Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which mandates increased blending of biofuels into the national motor fuel supply, ramping up from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion in 2022.
- Tax credits including the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), which pays out $0.45 for each gallon of corn ethanol; a parallel program for biodiesel worth $1.00 per gallon; and a production tax credit that pays $1.01 for each gallon of cellulosic ethanol produced.
“In their current form, these tax credits scale linearly with production, without limit,” notes Koplow. This means that the $9.5 billion in subsidies in 2008 increases six-fold to $60 billion in 2022, “due both to more production and to a shift to more heavily subsidized cellulosic fuels.” The cumulative cost from 2008 to 2022: $420 billion, nearly 40% of which will go to the corn industry.
But wait, there may be more. As a candidate, Obama proposed to up the RFS to 60 billion gallons by 2030. If this proposal is adopted, “subsidies would top $120 billion per year by the end of the period, for a cumulative subsidy during the 2008-2030 period of more than $1 trillion.”
Kudos to Koplow and his colleagues at Friends of the Earth for this important contribution.
That would be Karl Bohnak, chief meteorologist at WLUC-TV on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, who calls global warming alarmism his “pet peeve” and finally got so fed up with it that he wrote to his congressman, Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak. He shared his letter in a blog post on his station’s Web site:
For years as a broadcast meteorologist, I kept silent about the issue of “global warming.” Declaring skepticism labeled you (and still does) as an anti-environmentalist. After former VP Gore’s movie hit the big screen, I could remain silent no more. “An Inconvenient Truth” was filled with so many gross distortions and outright scientific misrepresentations; I felt it was my obligation to speak out….
CO2 is not a pollutant and it’s not a problem. The problem is rent-seeking corporations looking to cash in on cap and trade and low-output, high-cost alternative energy. As your Michigan House colleague Congressman Dingell says “cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one.” This is not the time to raise energy prices, which is what this bill will surely do. I believe the majority of your constituents will suffer adversely if this legislation is passed.
After receiving Stupak’s standard constituent letter, Bohnak responded with some data that clarified some of the congressman’s misconceptions. Then Bohnak addresses readers of his blog, and specifically takes aim at his own industry — the media:
Note Congressman Stupak’s response on the issue of higher energy costs. He states that he wants to make sure “unreasonable costs” are not passed on to consumers. I ask, “What are unreasonable costs?” I do not want to pay ANY higher costs (reasonable or unreasonable) for a problem that just isn’t there.
I ask you to look at the data. Don’t fall for the line that “An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing this unusual warming of our planet.” Majority rule is not how science is conducted. If one wants to play that game, there’s a growing segment of scientists that have declared themselves “global warming skeptics.” Get as much information as you can, but you will NOT get it from the mainstream media (MSM). The MSM is in the business of whipping up fear (look at the recent swine flu story). Stories that the world is heading toward a precipice are right up its alley. Also, there is at least one corporate media owner (My note, not Bohnak’s: this is General Electric, owner of NBC) that has a high stake in seeing this bill passed.
A subtly brave statement by Bohnak, considering his station’s network affiliation. Good for him.
Sending Us Back to 1875
U.S. Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), Washington Times, 10 May 2009
The war against global warming evidently starts at home, where President Obama says the price of electricity will “necessarily skyrocket” when the government caps carbon dioxide and issues emissions permits that utilities can buy and sell to one another.
Is Copenhagen Already Dead?
Terence Corcoran, National Post, 12 May 2009
The great global policy push for massive climate control laws and big fat taxes on carbon appear to be heading into a brick wall. From Australia to British Columbia, from Washington to Copenhagen, there are growing signs that the much anticipated replacement for the Kyoto Accord will be as dead as Kyoto before it arrives.
Expose Cap-and-Trade Costs
Jason Chaffetz, Washington Times, 12 May 2009
Government gets more of our money, and utility companies get the blame when they pass on the tax increase to consumers.
Maybe forever!
On April 30, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) placed a hold on the nomination of Regina McCarthy as Assistant Administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. “The nominee has failed to address serious concerns” about how the EPA would regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act, once the Agency finalizes its endangerment finding, Barrasso stated.
The endangerment finding will compel EPA to establish GHG standards for new motor vehicles. This will make carbon dioxide (CO2) a pollutant “subject to regulation” under the Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program. An estimated 1.2 million previously unregulated buildings and facilities emit enough CO2 each year (250 tons) to qualify as “major stationary sources” under the PSD program. All would become vulnerable to new controls, monitoring, paperwork, penalties, and litigation. In 2003, the average PSD permit cost each applicant $125,120 and 866 burden hours to obtain.
Last week, Sen. Barrasso asked Ms. McCarthy how she would protect small businesses from PSD lawuits. The nominee replied that she will “request that I be informed if any such notice is filed with regard to a small source, and I will follow up with the potential litigants.” Barrasso commented: “The solution to this problem is not to have government officials go around asking litigants not to sue. That is not a solution and entirely unrealistic. I expect more.”
Short of amending the Clean Air Act, however, there may be no solution–which means Sen. Barrasso may have to keep the “hold” on for a very long time. The law clearly states that an entity must obtain a PSD permit before it builds or modifies a facility with the potential to emit 250 tons per year (TPY) of a regulated air pollutant, and all kinds of non-industrial facilities–office buildings, big box stores, apartment complexes, enclosed malls, heated warehouses, even commercial kitchens–actually emit 250 TPY of CO2.
In his press release, Barrasso cites a Wall Street Journal article stating that Kassie Siegel, Director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, plans to sue EPA if the Agency does not apply PSD requirements to small sources. Siegel denied this in an email to Greenwire (subscription required): “The Center for Biological Diversity is not going to sue the EPA to regulate small sources of carbon dioxide, nor is anyone else.” But she cannot possibly know that no NIMBY activist somewhere will not file a PSD suit to block or delay construction of new Wal-Mart stores, strip malls, fast food restaurants, etc.
Besides, as Borrasso pointed out in a press release last Friday, in its comment on EPA’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the Center for Biological Diversity lauds the PSD program as “an effective tool for reducing GHG emissions” precisely because ”it applies to a wide array of sources that will emit in excess of the applicable statutory thresholds of 250 or 100 tons per year.”
The Center further comments that, “the asserted belief of EPA officials that the statutory requirements are burdensome or not ‘efficient’ as they should be simply does not excuse the agency from following the law. The EPA has no authority to weaken the requirements of the statute simply because political appointees don’t like the law’s requirements.”
The Center files lots of lawsuits, and they just established a $17 million litigation fund to ensure that U.S. environmental statutes are “fully implemented” to reduce GHG emissions. In keeping with this, the Center’s ANPR comment argues that EPA “must” establish National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for CO2 of no more than 350 parts per million. Even outright de-industrialization of the United States would likely be insufficient to meet that standard. Maybe that’s why the Center has no plan to sue EPA to regulate small sources. If the Center successfully sues EPA to set NAAQS for CO2 at 350 ppm, there won’t be many businesses left to regulate.
David Bookbinder, chief climate council for the Sierra Club, similarly dismissed Borrasso’s concerns about PSD regulation of small sources. Asked what his response to Borrasso would be, Bookbinder told BNA (subscription required): “Nothing you could print.”
Yet earlier this year, the Sierra Club decided not to put a stay on Bush EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson’s interpretative rule limiting PSD to air pollutants currently subject to emission controls–a category that does not include CO2. Bookbinder acknowledged to Greenwire that if Johnson’s rule were simply overturned, EPA would have to regulate small sources of CO2. He explained: ”The Clean Air Act has language in there that is kind of all or nothing if CO2 gets regulated, and it could be unbelievably complicated and administratively nightmarish for both EPA and the states if they were to yank the Johnson memo and not have something in place that makes it clear that we’re going after only the very large sources.”
The real nightmare would be for the firms regulated, not the regulators. Like Siegel, Bookbinder presumes to speak for all potential litigants. In reality, neither Sierra Club nor Center for Biological Diversity has a monopoly on Clean Air Act litigation. The law is clear–250 tons is the threshold for regulation. And all it takes is one NIMBY activist to file the citizen suit that forces EPA to follow the law.
President Obama could quickly fix the whole problem if he wanted to. All he’d have to do is offer legislation to preclude EPA regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Nearly all Republicans and many Democrats in Congress would vote for it, because it would protect our ailing economy from litigation-driven regulatory excess.
But Obama will not do this, because he wants to use the threat of EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act as a legislative hammer to beat opponents of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill into submission. This is too clever by half, however, as I argue here and here. If EPA does bring the might and fury of the Clean Air Act down upon CO2 emitters, Obama will have to take major responsibility for the increase in energy prices, the lost jobs, and the shuttered businesses.
A friend of a friend who leads a business association in Washington state passed along a note about a recent trip he made to D.C., where after several meetings on the Hill he concluded that “while Congress, particularly the U.S. Senate, may want to slow down and catch its breath with the President’s agenda (on global warming), environmental groups are just getting charged up.” He noted the upcoming EPA public comment hearings on regulating CO2 in Arlington, VA and Seattle, and cited specifically the Sierra Club’s call to action for those hearings. From the appeal posted at Sierra Club’s Web site:
The next step is showing there is a real call for change at upcoming EPA public hearings in Arlington, VA on May 18 and Seattle, WA on May 21.
Big Oil and Coal have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying efforts in Washington D.C., and we know they will push hard against any regulation from the EPA. We need to turn these hearings into a powerful demonstration that our country’s future will not be set by the coal industry and their allies. Please sign up today!
That the Sierra Club criticizes so-called “Big Oil and Coal’s” spending of millions of dollars, as though it was a David vs. Goliath scenario, is the height of deception. Between the three fiscal tax years of 2005 through 2007 (the years tax returns were available on Guidestar), the Club (a 501(c)(4) nonprofit) and its Foundation (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) combined spent a total of more than $170 million to promote, educate, litigate and lobby on behalf of its agenda, an enormous percentage of which pushes the alarmism button on global warming and opposes more affordable fossil fuel development and power generation. And Sierra Club’s contribution to the effort is only a fraction of the overall financial muscle behind the alarmists’ effort — don’t forget groups like Environmental Defense, Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, and others, plus the multi-billion dollar foundations who help fund them.
The Washington state business leader adds this in his report:
They have a pretty active strategy and it is working right now. They have jammed the Seattle hearing on May 21 and there is little time for anyone else to testify. Their ultimate goal is to put Congress in a corner so they either embrace and pass President Obama’s agenda or put EPA in a position to enforce it.
Whether or not submitting a comment or testifying to Obama’s EPA about regulating CO2 is worthwhile or not is up to the individual, but it is undoubtedly worthwhile to submit your comments to the dozens of Democrat fence-sitters in Congress who are suffering heartburn (PDF) over the thought of having to vote for cap-and-trade this year.
On Guns and Climate, Elites Are Out of Touch
Michael Barone, RealClearPolitics.com, 11 May 2009
Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don’t. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction.
Climate Controls Too Costly Down Under
Wall Street Journal, 11 May 2009
It’s turning out that the biggest problem with carbon taxes is political reality. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has just announced he will delay implementing his trademark cap-and-trade emissions trading proposal until at least 2011. Mr. Rudd’s March proposal would have imposed total carbon permit costs (taxes) of 11.5 billion Australian dollars (US$8.5 billion) in the first two years, starting in 2010. This would have increased consumer prices by about 1.1% and shaved 0.1% off annual GDP growth until at least 2050, according to Australia’s Treasury. Support has fallen among business groups and individuals who earlier professed enthusiasm for Aussie cap and trade. Green gains were negligible; Australia accounts for only 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Spin Doctors Try To Rescue Energy Rationing Bill
Peter Nicholas & Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2009
In the debate over his top environmental goals, President Obama is backing away from “cap and trade.”
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