So which is it? Is the world warming as Obama and Goreleoni claim?
Or should we be anticipating another ice age as predicted by TIME?
Could both realities be true because they represent the natural course of physics? Trying to make a connection between human activities and the warming or cooling of the world is simply foolish. A writer for Accuracy in Media puts it this way: “In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.”25
As any student in the fifth grade knows, there have been at least five ice ages in the history of planet Earth. At one time, ice covered the planet from the North Pole down to the Great Plains almost to the equator. And yet, somehow the ice receded long before man invented the internal combustion engine, decades before the creation of the first Model-T or even the millionth SUV hit the streets.
What’s more, when compared to the number of people who inhabit the earth today, the population of humankind was rather small during the most recent ice age. So, why did the ice melt? Did man somehow create global warming to end that ice age because he rubbed a few sticks together to build his campfire?
None of this matters to President Obama.
His mind has been made up because he wants global warming to be true. Why? Because that will enable him to confiscate and control an even larger portion of the private sector. So, with the soaring voice of a preacher, Obama concluded his message to the delegates in Copenhagen, saying, “With courage and faith, I believe that we can meet our responsibilities to our people and the future of our planet.”26 With “courage and faith”?
Obama went from science to faith in order to save the planet.
Thankfully, as of this writing, cap-and-trade legislation has stalled in the Congress. But don’t be fooled. That setback isn’t about to thwart Barack Obama in his quest for ultimate power and authority over every aspect of our lives. Indeed, one of the characteristics of Obama’s governance is that he has no respect for the rule of law or for the U.S. Constitution. If he can’t implement his agenda through the legislative process, he’ll bypass Congress and find a way to achieve his ends regardless. He’s demonstrated this particularly egregiously with regard to his energy policy agenda.
When cap-and-trade bombed out in Congress, Obama, using an ill-advised 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said that the so-called “greenhouse gas” carbon dioxide was a pollutant and that the EPA had the “obligation” to regulate greenhouse gases, went ahead and empowered that government office to do what the failed legislation was designed to do.27
Mark my words. Just as President Obama and his gangster regime rammed a socialist healthcare plan through Congress using tactics seen in South American banana republics, he won’t stop until he shoves cap-and-trade down our throats, too. If so much were at stake, upwards of $45 trillion worldwide,28 wouldn’t you at least want to hear all sides of the argument? While President Obama and many members of Congress turn a deaf ear to the emerging Climategate scandal, the middle class and the Tea Party movement are awakening to the fact their pocketbooks and wallets are about to get screwed.
Sticking It to the Middle Class: All Cost, No Benefit
The other day, I was in the supermarket picking up a few things for dinner. I was headed toward the checkout line when a woman who drove her shopping cart like a go-cart cut me off. She blazed a trail through the vegetable section in order to cut me off at the pass. I’m about to put my four items down and this clipped hair lib cuts in front. I looked at her, but didn’t say anything.
As she put down her six or seven items, she started to fume. I can tell by the way she’s tilting her head that she’s counting the number of items of the person in front of her. She’s gunning for a fight. This was the express lane after all, the one with a ten-item limit. The guy up front had eleven items. Granted, he had two bananas. The bananas were probably once together. So the lady develops an attitude. She’s itching to bust him. I can tell she’s dying to say, “Hey, they’re not connected anymore. You took them apart.” Theoretically, he could be thrown off the express lane.
Admittedly, while I didn’t appreciate being cut off by her, I can understand her impatience. My patience is tried when I get stuck behind a troublemaker in a supermarket line. They know it’s a checkout line for ten-items-or-less, and the sign clearly says “express,” but then he pays by check! Granted, the sign doesn’t say “cash only” and there’s no governing legal authority to settle the matter.
Still, when they pull out their checkbook, moths fly out of the pages and I’m stuck. Slowly, they fill out the check as if they’re an ancient scribe carefully transcribing the Old Testament. Meanwhile, the express line has grown until it circles back to the meat department. Now I’m fuming.
The manager sends the guy with the earrings and pierced nose to open another lane. The kid mumbles, “Next in line.” Naturally, it’s always the guy just behind you who didn’t put the groceries down that he takes in his lane. If you were to say, “Wait a minute. I’m next,” the kid suddenly thinks he’s a member of the UN peacekeeper force. He says, “No, sir, next in line. You already put your groceries down.”
I hate shopping for this reason. They’ve taken all the joy out of it.
Normally I enjoy walking down the rich aisles of America’s supermarkets, particularly when I see the bountiful harvest that we have. It all dies for me at the checkout line. Here’s the connection to cap-and-trade. There’s one thing about shopping you can count on. Whether you’re at the grocery store, a department store, or the gas station, when it comes to making a purchase, you know the price of what you’re buying before you have to pay for it.
There’s no ambiguity, no guesswork, and no costly surprises.
That’s not the case when it comes to paying for President Obama’s costly cap-and-trade scheme. If Congress buys into this unnecessary legislation and passes some version of cap-and-trade, guess what? Nobody knows the real cost of what we’re “buying”! Although we’re left to foot the bill for the rest of our lives, not one person in Congress can tell you, with precision, what you the middle-class consumer must fork over to reduce greenhouse gasses.
Did you get that?
Not one person.
Projections regarding the final cost to the taxpayer are all over the map. The Wall Street Journal concurs: “The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in.”29 And, while cap-and-trade legislation is supposed to provide a “solution” for the threat of global warming, it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
What’s more, even if global warming wasn’t an alarmist fictional invention hatched in Al Goreleoni’s mind, not one politician can tell us how much CO2 reduction will actually occur for our money. Even the corrupt Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates a mere drop in global temperatures of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.30 But of course they can’t say that with certainty because while America may attempt to cap carbon output, China, which is the biggest carbon polluter on the plant, “has no intention of capping greenhouse gas emissions” for the foreseeable future.31
Ditto for India and several other countries. Do you know what that means?
Polluting companies in America will just move jobs offshore to China.
Let’s look at a few examples of the projected price tag for this charade. The Congressional Budget Office estimated an increase of $175 a year per family for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill (which passed on June 26, 2009, by a vote of 219–212 in the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate).32 The Dems aren’t the only ones complicit in passing this nightmare for the middle class, by the way. Eight Republican turncoats in the House of Representatives went along with this folly.
You might think, “Well, Michael, $175 doesn’t sound like that much mone
y.” Let me put it to you this way. Why fork any amount of money over to the government to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? Not to mention that the $175 figure doesn’t factor in the decrease in gross domestic product (GDP), and higher cost of goods and services resulting from the cap.
Don’t believe for one minute that cap-and-trade will cost you $175 a year.
Obama’s own budget director, Peter Orszag, pegs the number much higher. He estimates the average American family will pay $1,300 per year in higher utility costs33—and that’s supposedly buys us a mere reduction of 15 percent in CO2 emissions, a far cry from the fanciful targeted reduction of 80 percent in carbon impact over the next number of years. To obtain that lofty goal of cap-and-trade, using Orszag’s numbers, your out-of-pocket spending would ultimately be $6,933 per year by 2035.
Senator James Inhofe, one of the few outspoken global warming detractors in Congress, puts the initial cost of cap-and-trade at $3,200 per family per year, almost triple the figure used by Obama’s budget operative. Inhofe didn’t make up his numbers out of thin air—hot or otherwise. He cited several studies including those by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wharton School of Economics to arrive at this figure.
The scholars at the Heritage Foundation did a careful review of the Waxman-Markey bill with an eye on the long-term implications. They project the cost to the average family of four for cap-and-trade would rise to $ 6,800 by 2035. Some perspective is in order. Obama’s plan will require you to shell out more than the average American family spends annually on clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances, and select groceries (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, fruits, and vegetables) combined!34
You might want to read that again.
There’s a dirty little secret in all of this.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Demoncats structured the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade proposal to “water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats.”35 In other words, in order to get the thing passed with minimal resistance, they presented the proposal in the best possible light and then, years later, the most confiscatory provisions kick in which will soak the middle class with an incredible tax burden.
None of these estimates includes the cost of high gas prices at the pump—predicted to be $5 to $8 per gallon. One Harvard study reports in order to meet President Obama’s goal of slashing greenhouse gas and carbon emissions from cars, Americans better get used to paying $7 a gallon.36 The idea here is that the more you, the middle class, must pay for auto fuel, the less you’ll want to drive. With fewer cars on the road, there will be fewer emissions, which will lower the impact on global warming. The other goal of high fuel costs is to drive you to spend $30,000 on an electric car with a top speed slower than a galloping horse.
What’s more, there’s an incredible financial burden on the middle class associated with the loss of millions of U.S. jobs that will be outsourced overseas. While pinpointing how many million jobs will be lost, or what the dollar value of those lost jobs represents is difficult, the Heritage Foundation provided this analysis. As mentioned previously, they determined that if six hundred hurricanes slammed our shores, they wouldn’t cause as much economic damage as would the cap-and-trade legislation Congress is considering:
In the first 20 years, Lieberman-Warner [an earlier version of a cap-and-trade bill] would have destroyed nearly 3 million jobs, caused some manufacturing sectors to cut jobs by 50% and generated up to $300 billion per year in government revenue while reducing income by nearly $5 trillion. For comparison, this is equal to the economic damage done by over 600 hurricanes … and the Markey-Waxman bill is worse37 [emphasis added].
Are you starting to get the picture? Cap-and-Trade is really Cap-and-TAX.
What’s more, the preachers of the global warming myth are using the alleged crisis to line their pockets. Yes, this is nothing less than a massive tax on energy to enrich a handful of carbon-offset investors. We’re seeing unrestrained fraud overseas where a version of cap-and-trade is already being abused by fat cats who have made millions in profits and stand to make billions. Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Great Britain, comes to mind. As WorldNetDaily reports, Mittal “stands to gain a £1 billion windfall, not from the operation of his ArcelorMittal steel company, but from carbon credits given his company—at no cost—by the EU emissions trading scheme.”38
In Europe, the top ten largest polluters on that continent reaped carbon permits in 2008 “worth 500 million euros.” One report estimated these same firms “stand to collect surplus CO2 permits that—at current market rates—could be worth 3.2 billion euros ($4.3 billion dollars) by 2012” and, making matters worse, noted “little or no actual ‘effort’ toward emissions reductions need have taken place, yet these companies will be able to literally bank the profits.”39
The temptation to engage in this swindling is overwhelming, especially when $31 billion in carbon credits are being traded on the European Climate Exchange. As one columnist points out, “Unlike other commodities, like wheat or coffee, you can’t ship a boxcar-load of carbon dioxide to the purchaser. The trades are done strictly on paper. The intangible nature of carbon credits provides the perfect opportunity for international fraud.”40
Beyond the profiteering, what the sheeple seem to forget is that cap-and-trade presents a bonanza of opportunities for those in political power to court favor and extract cash from business. Even the leftist Old York Times admits the cap-and-trade measure “is almost perfectly designed for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific Congressional districts.”41
In spite of these abuses, in spite of the clear and mounting evidence that global warming is nothing more than an elaborate house of cards constructed out of trumped-up pseudo-science, Obama wants to increase—not decrease—spending your tax dollars! Like a drunken poker player who doesn’t know when to leave the table, he’s doubling down on the expansion of the federal climate science program. In 2009, the Congressional budget included $2 billion in funding for the Global Change Research Program. In 2011, Obama’s federal budget calls for that figure to jump to $2.6 billion.42
The timing of such wasteful, unnecessary and, yes, immoral spending couldn’t be worse. The middle class is already breaking under the weight of the deepest recession in their lifetime. Thanks to this lack of leadership or, should I say, because of these arrogant corrupt politicians, the very real crisis of trickle up poverty is guaranteed to mushroom. If the Senate passes the Waxman-“Malarkey” bill, millions will lose their jobs to outsourcing to countries without caps. The cost of home electricity and heating oil will skyrocket.
Prices at the pump will jump.
The hit to your pocket book is monumental and permanent.
Some rich will get richer. The middle class will get poorer.
I am angry. You should be, too.
Read My Lips: No New Taxes
President George H. W. Bush failed to be reelected largely for violating a campaign promise not to raise taxes. During his campaign for president, candidate Obama repeatedly said something strikingly similar: “But let me be perfectly clear. If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”43
That is false on so many levels it’s laughable.
It’s a well-known fact that the middle class pays a significantly higher proportion of their income on energy bills (electric, gas, oil, gasoline) than do wage earners in the upper tax brackets. For example, if your salary is $3,000 a month and your utility bill is $300, that means 10 percent of your income is used to pay for this expense. However, if your salary is $9,000 a month, then just 3.3 percent of your income goes to this expense. As such, in order to meet a government mandated cap on CO2 emissions, the net effect of higher costs to heat and cool your home, or fuel your car, wil
l be steeply regressive.
In other words, Obama misled the middle class when he promised not to raise their taxes “one single dime.” Look at what the man predicted would happen to the price of your utility bill in light of a cap-and-trade energy tax program. Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in January, 2008:
When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, you know, under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say
about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.44
He just said your electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket.”
Actually, your utility bills don’t “necessarily” need to do anything if the government would stick to the things they are constitutionally mandated to do. Defending our national borders—not defending an indefensible, manufactured, straw man crisis like cap-and-trade—comes to mind.
What Obama and his cadres want you to believe is that cap-and-trade is nothing more than a “market-based approach” toward cutting back emissions. That’s more than misleading. It’s an outright lie. Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, rightly notes, “Cap-and-trade subordinates markets to central planning. It takes the most important economic decisions out of the hands of private individuals acting in the market and puts them in the hands of government.”45
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 21
