Little wonder we have such a problem these days with the economy. The liberal order that exists in Washington, see this as mass hypnosis by Marxists socialists, believes that by enslaving the population to poverty and deprivation will solve all problems. Of course the ruling elite will not have to endure the same poverty as, after all, they must be fit to rule.
The Marxist socialists that rule in Washington today do not care what happens to this country - what they are doing can not just be from ignorance of reality. One cannot be that stupid, not even a politician, not even a liberal Democrat. But maybe I'm wrong although it would seem that the Democrats have always wanted to crush individual freedom as they see this as a threat to their march to total power. i.e. gun control - disarm the population?
I still struggle with the concept where so many people are more than willing to give up personal freedom for only a promise of security. Common sense can see that there is no way the liberal Marxist socialists can deliver on any of their promises, but yet the majority voters stand by with eyes glazed over and nearly brain dead "hoping" that the "change" to socialism will be their salvation. It's impossible, isn't it, that so many people have no concept of what is in store under such a totalitarian agenda.
Are we truly ready to be enslaved? Willingly ready to give up 234 years of freedom and prosperity for a single promise of security derived from laws designed to take from others for reasons of revenge and power?
Please tell me it isn't so!
Keep the faith
The Costs of the Cap-and-Trade Bill
By Robert Zubrin
Special to Roll Call
July 1, 2009, 9:45 a.m.
On June 25, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate stabilization
act, which would institute a cap-and-trade system to restrict Americans’
carbon emissions. While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that
the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further
from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly
regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only
extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our
borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere.
To understand this, it is only necessary to look at the numbers.
According to a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in
April, by 2015 the price of carbon emission indulgences required by the
bill for industries to operate could be expected to run between $13 and
$17 per ton of CO2 emitted. It may be noted that this estimate was made
by an Obama administration agency highly favorable to the bill and that
it did not take into account the very real possibility that speculators
might act aggressively to buy up all the available indulgences and then,
acting like ticket scalpers, force industrial users to purchase them at
greatly inflated prices. So these EPA figures for carbon emission costs
should be viewed as minimal. That said, let’s stipulate the $15/ton
midrange of the EPA estimate, and see what it implies.
The United States emits about 9 billion tons of CO2 per year. Therefore,
at a rate of $15/ton fee for emission indulgences, the bill would impose
a tax of $135 billion per year on the nation. Divided by the U.S.
population of 300 million, that works out to a cost of $450 per year
levied on every American man, woman or child, or $1,800 for a family of
four. While for wealthy individuals like Al Gore such an impost might
represent a mere pittance, for working families struggling hard to make
ends meet it would be a very significant burden.
But that is not even the worst part of it. As a result of the markup of
carbon costs, a lot of those working families will be out of work and
unable to pay their existing bills, let alone new ones. Consider:
Burning one ton of coal produces about three tons of CO2. So a tax of
$15 per ton of CO2 emitted is equivalent to a tax of $45/ton on coal.
The price of Eastern anthracite coal runs in the neighborhood of
$45/ton, so under the proposed system, such coal would be taxed at a
rate of about 100 percent. The price of Western bituminous coal is
currently about $12/ton. This coal would therefore be taxed at a rate of
almost 400 percent.
Coal provides half of America’s electricity, so such
extraordinary imposts could easily double the electric bills paid by
consumers and businesses across half the nation. In addition, many
businesses, such as the metals and chemical industries, use a great deal
of coal directly. By doubling or potentially even quadrupling the cost
of their most basic feedstock, the cap-and-trade system’s indulgence
fees could make many such businesses uncompetitive and ultimately throw
millions of working men and women onto the unemployment lines.
A gallon of petroleum-derived liquid fuel produces about 20 pounds, or 1
percent of a ton, of CO2 when burned. But it takes about 1.5 gallons of
oil to produce one gallon of refined liquid fuel. So a $15/ton tax on
CO2 emissions will also cause an increase in the price of gasoline,
diesel and jet fuel on the order of $0.22/gallon. This will not only hit
consumers’ pockets, but increase transport costs throughout the economy,
thereby disabling businesses and increasing unemployment levels still
more.
While harming the economy, such a gas tax will do nothing material
toward the truly essential goal of decreasing America’s dependence on
foreign oil. Indeed, the bill’s dramatic hikes in electricity costs will
have the opposite effect, since only 3 percent of America’s electricity
is derived from oil, and by forcefully increasing electric power costs,
the bill will actually discourage adoption of electric means of
transport, including mass-transit systems today and potentially plug-in
hybrid cars in the future. America’s dependence on foreign oil could be
substantially relieved by legislation requiring that new cars sold in
the United States be flex-fueled and thus able to run equally well on
alcohol fuels derived from a multitude of nonpetroleum sources, but the
bill’s provisions in this area are so weak as to be worthless.
But all these bad aspects of the Waxman-Markey bill pale before its
potential impact on the world’s food supply. America’s agricultural
sector is one of the greatest success stories in human history. In 1930,
hunger still stalked the entire globe. Not just in Africa, India and
China, but even in Europe and America, the struggle to simply get enough
food to live on still preoccupied billions of people.
Since 1930, the world population has tripled. But instead of going hungrier, people
nearly everywhere are now eating much better. This miracle is the work
of American farmers, who have not only produced huge surpluses to feed
the world, but used the income gained from such good work to pioneer
ever more advanced techniques that have enabled farmers everywhere to
grow more. This progress is still continuing. In 2007, Iowa alone
produced more corn than the entire United States did in 1947, and the
300,000 American corn growers as a whole produced 784 billion pounds of
corn, an amount sufficient to supply 130 pounds of corn per year to
every person on the planet.
But this miracle depends upon the availability of cheap fertilizer and pesticides, which in turn require carbon-based process energy to produce. If you tax carbon, you tax
fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by
no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production
costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bill’s increased
transport costs inflating the burden still more. That’s enough to make
many farmers use less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means less food.
To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer,
it is only necessary to go to the supermarket and compare the price of
the “organic” produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular
produce, which, while just as nutritious, typically costs less than half
as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily
pay such high prices for their food — that is their right. But to impose
such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the
poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather,
is self-indulgent in the extreme.
In the 220 years of our republic, there may have been worse pieces of
legislation enacted by Congress than the Waxman-Markey bill, but none
readily comes to mind. The Senate needs to take a stand and stop this
disastrous act from passing into law.
*Robert Zubrin is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment