Stop Cap and Trade
It’s not enough for the Obama administration to decimate our economy through massive spending and higher taxes; they are still determined to control the energy industry by pushing through a “cap and trade” scheme, based on the manmade global warming theory and the fantasy that “green energy” can power our advanced industrial civilization.
In effect, through a system called “cap-and-trade,” Obama will try to pay for a massively increased middle-class welfare state by taxing the lifeblood of the economy — energy production.
This constitutes a massive, across-the-board tax increase on everyone, not just the rich, and it is a plan that is likely to prevent an economic recovery from occurring at all, or to drive the economy back into a deeper recession. It could very well be the final nail in our coffin.
His plan calls for a 14% constriction of our energy usage in the next decade, and more than an 80% constriction by 2050. In other words, its goal is privation. Think about that. Obama has even admitted that under this scheme, energy prices will “skyrocket” and he will “bankrupt the coal industry.” Currently, 50% of our energy comes from coal.
Many people ask, what is the downside to mandating a “green energy policy” (so we can get off fossil fuels and foreign oil) and having the government forcibly tell energy producers what they can and cannot produce?
Aside from the fact that: (1) doing so constitutes fascism; and (2) with nuclear energy off the table, other “green” forms of energy cannot possibly power our country, here is the downside:
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions even modestly is estimated to cost the average household in the U.S. approximately $3,372 per year and would destroy 2.4 million jobs. Electricity prices would double, and manufacturers would move their factories to places such as China and India that have cheaper energy and fewer environmental regulations.
In other words, the energy bill for every homeowner in America will likely double, it will costs businesses billions of dollars, it will kill jobs, and it will drive companies out of the U.S.
Enough of a downside for you?
The above data is taken from the International Conference On Climate Change website, which is a conference being held in New York City, March 8 - 10th, featuring a panel of over 70 scientists who dispute the manmade global warming theory.
These scientists say that Global Warming is not a “crisis” and never was. They point out the following facts:
- Since 2007, more than 31,072 American scientists, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds, have signed the a petition which says, in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
- A 2003 international survey of climate scientists (with 530 responding) found only 9.4 percent “strongly agreed” and 25.3 percent “agreed” with the statement “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” Some 10.2 percent “strongly disagreed.”
- A 2006 survey of scientists in the U.S. found 41 percent disagreed that the planet’s recent warmth “can be, in large part, attributed to human activity,” and 71 percent disagreed that recent hurricane activity is significantly attributable to human activity.
- A recent review of 1,117 abstracts of scientific journal articles on “global climate change” found only 13 (1 percent) explicitly endorse the “consensus view” while 34 reject or cast doubt on the view that human activity has been the main driver of warming over the past 50 years.
The mainstream of the scientific community, in other words, does not believe global warming is a crisis.
One of the scientists appearing at the conference is former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who said this, “the global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision-making.”
In addition to the devastating economic destruction a “cap-and-trade” scheme would cause, global warming activism and environmental restrictions also have devastating physical impacts on people in developing countries. Restricting their use and production of energy is the best way to keep poor people mired in poverty.
Now, if someone like Al Gore is going to demand that governments use their coercive power to forcibly dictate to free men what kind of energy they can and cannot produce (despite the fact that 31,027 American scientists disagree with him)… and massively increase the cost of electricity and power for every American family (even in the midst of a severe recession and financial crisis)… and cost energy producers billions, even bankrupting some of them on purpose… don’t you think the burden of proof for this rather fantastic theory is on him and those who agree with him?
Don’t you think they should at least have to provide a shred of empirical evidence about this looming “catastrophe?”
The facts are not on their side. As a matter of fact, we have had record low temperatures across the globe this winter and many scientists are reporting that we might be in a cooling phase.
William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, recently said this in testimony to to the U.S. Senate:
Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.
All of which is very inconvenient for Mr. Gore and his fellow true believers.
So there is hope that truth and common sense will win out on this issue.
For example, a government minister in Northern Ireland has banned government-funded global warming advertisements on television, which he denounced as “‘an insidious propaganda campaign’ peddling ‘patent nonsense.’”
And below is an article from London’s Daily Telegraph exposing the unscientific claims of the “warmists,” as they call them. If this sort of resistance can take hold in Britain and Ireland, where the environmentalist propaganda is farther along and more influential, it can be successful here, too.
“Climate Change Rhetoric Spirals Out of Control,” Christopher Booker, Daily Telegraph, February 21
It was another bad week for the “warmists”, now more desperate than ever to whip up alarm over an overheating planet. It began last weekend with the BBC leading its bulletins on the news that a “leading climate scientist” in America, Professor Chris Field, had warned that “the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed. The puzzle as to why the BBC should make this the main news of the day only deepened when it emerged that Prof Field was not a climate scientist at all but an evolutionary biologist.“…
The bottom line is this: the belief in the catastrophic manmade global warming theory is a faith-based belief.
Since there is no actual scientific evidence proving this theory, it requires you to accept the claims of Al Gore and his band of Chicken Littles on faith. Science is not a matter of opinion, nor is it a matter of consensus. There is no room for faith in science, that’s the realm of religion.
It’s one thing for you to believe Al Gore’s fantastic claims yourself and take individual actions consistent with your belief (like riding a bicycle to work instead of driving one of those planet killing SUV’s)… but it’s an entirely different matter for you to want to use taxpayer money to subsidize “green” energy companies, or FORCE the rest of us to comply with your beliefs via government legislation and “bans.”
Maybe, like Al Gore, you yearn for the death of the internal combustion engine, despite the fact that it is one of history’s greatest inventions and has provided tremendous benefits to mankind, including cleaning up the environment.
That’s fine, in America you’re perfectly free to create something better and see if you can get people to pay you for it. And by the way, nobody is forcing you to use those infernal machines either. Buy an electric car if you want. Or have the courage of your convictions and ride a bicycle to work.
But what you may NOT do in America is act like a little Hitler and “ban” it for the rest of us or impose draconian restrictions and regulations on CO2 that will increase every American’s energy bills and tax burden.
Doing so is utter fascism.
And the above point really gets to the heart of the matter about this whole issue. It’s never enough for liberals (socialists) to express an opinion and leave it at that. They always have to use government to force everyone else to comply with their opinions no matter how vehemently we disagree with them and no matter how crazy we think they are.
When people take the time to examine the things socialists propose, they generally do not go along voluntarily. Their ideas and opinions will not stand the test of a free marketplace. So in order to get people to comply, socialists push for government legislation by manufacturing a crisis.
The issue of “global warming” is the perfect “crisis” for them. After all, what could be more important than a PLANETARY emergency? How could we not “do something” if we’ll be facing a 20-foot rise in sea levels as Al Gore claims?
The trouble is, man-made catastrophic global warming is a hobgoblin that exists only in Al Gore’s fevered brain. Cast the light of reason on it and you will see that this whole thing is a political agenda driven by environmental extremists. These are the same people that manufactured the “Global Cooling” scare of the 1970’s and the “population bomb” scare of the 1960’s.
Note also that the term “global warming” has now changed to “climate change.” Gee, I wonder if that’s because the earth has not been warming over the past few years? They want to cover themselves either way. In other words, they’re saying, “we don’t really know whether it’s warming or cooling, but whatever’s going on, we know that it’s bad and that man is to blame…”
Right. And Al Gore invented the Internet.
And the irony of ironies is this — even if CO2 were responsible for a warming trend, all schemes such as Kyoto would be completely ineffective—unless we could persuade every nation, including China, to cut fuel use by 80 percent!
In other words, spending trillions of dollars and paying double what we pay now for electricity would accomplish absolutely nothing in terms of changing the climate. And Obama and Gore know that.
Before you join “The Church Of The Warming Globe,” and start advocating that governments force faith-based global warming tenets on others, please study both sides of the issue and arm yourself with the facts.
In addition to the Conference mentioned above, which will have several presentations online, here are some other good places to start:
GLOBAL WARMING RESOURCES:
Global Warming Authoritarianism
The Great Global Warming Swindle (article)
Global Warming Hoax (video from Glen Beck show)
The Green Energy Fantasy, by Keith Lokitch
Global Warming Facts, Heartland Institute
Understanding The Greenhouse Effect
Environmentalism as Religion, by Michael Crichton
In closing, let me predict that 100 years from now, historians will look back on our times and say, “with all the real problems that age faced, such as the Islamic jihad and a global financial crisis, it was amazing that a group of nuts tried to convince people that humans could actually control the earth’s temperature and that the internal combustion engine represented the greatest threat to civilization.”
-TJM