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Chris Simcox Opposes Cap & Trade

Chris Simcox, founder of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by John McCain, has denounced the Cap & Trade bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Simcox said, “The Cap & Trade Bill that squeaked through the House needs to bring a roar of opposition from voters in Arizona and across the nation. This is bad legislation that will, if passed by the Senate, not only bring us much higher costs in energy, as Obama has promised, but it will also bring a heavy cost to our sovereign freedom as a nation. It will represent a treaty that’ll not only pull us deeper into the European Union, but will also yield control of America’s free market for energy to international concerns.”

Simcox quoted John McCain who wrote in a March 18, 2008 Financial Times op-ed piece that, “We need a successor to Kyoto, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner.”

Simcox criticized McCain saying that, “McCain has accepted the premise of man-made global warming as settled science, when, in fact, every day more credible sources are stepping forward to challenge that premise.”

Simcox said that, “A year after McCain endorsed Cap & Trade, the Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, released a draft document, dated March 9, 2009, that stated, ‘We do not maintain that we or anyone else have all the answers needed to take action now.’ The document continues, ‘We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA before any attempt is made to reach conclusions on the subject...The science has and undoubtedly will continue to change and EPA must have the capability of keeping abreast of these changes if it is to successfully discharge its responsibilities.’ So,” Simcox stated, “the EPA itself has yet to accept the premise of Cap & Trade!”

Simcox added, “Senator McCain made a hasty and uninformed decision when he supported the TARP bailout bill. Concerning Cap & Trade, he’s has made a long but equally uninformed decision to support a concept that would be better called ‘Tax & Control.’ McCain was wrong about TARP then, and he’s wrong about Cap & Trade now.”