Obama’s hidden bailout of General Electric ( Cap and trade taxes )

While many companies hire lobbyists to win earmarks, General Electric’s unmatched lobbying force has secured a tax increase — or its equivalent — in President Barack Obama’s budget.

Labeled “climate revenues” and totaling $646 billion over eight years, this line item in Obama’s budget has inspired confidence in GE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt. As Immelt put it in a letter this week, he believes that the Obama administration will be a profitable “financier” and “key partner.”

On page 115 of Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget is Table S-2, titled “Effect of Budget Proposals on Projected Deficits.” The chart forecasts the costs of Obama’s spending proposals and the added revenue of his proposed tax increases. It also forecasts, beginning in 2012, billions of dollars a year in “climate revenues.” This budget line, which has struck fear into some lawmakers from coal-dependent states, could spell salvation for GE in these times of uncertainty.

How can Obama generate “climate revenues”? By forcing companies to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

A tax on greenhouse gas emissions could accomplish this, but Obama’s preferred policy — and the approach embraced by a few congressional bills in recent years — is called “cap and trade.” In short, cap and trade requires businesses to spend “credits” to pay for their emissions. Businesses can buy or sell these credits, and the market — not the government — would directly set the price of a credit. Government would initially auction them off, generating revenue.

GE — a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which advocates cap and trade — leads the push for greenhouse gas restrictions.

“I hope GE goes the way of Westinghouse. Would serve them right in more ways than one.” ~ freekitty

I hope they, and their CEO, go the way of ENRON and its CEO.

It’s the same corporation with a different name.

Results 1 - 10 of about 50,900 for enron cap and trade.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=enron+cap+and+trade&btnG=Google+Search

Tip of the iceberg:

05/08/2008
“Cap and Trade” - an Enron Brainchild
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/a...ate_oct_5.html

Quote:
Amidst the talk about the benefits that Kyoto Protocol is supposed to promote, it is perhaps forgotten especially amongst the greenies how Kyoto was born in the corridors of very big business. The name Enron has all but faded from our news pages since the company went down in flames in 2001 amidst charges of fraud, bribery, price fixing and graft.

But without Enron there would have been no Kyoto Protocol.

About 20 years ago Enron was owner and operator of an interstate network of natural gas pipelines, and had transformed itself into a billion-dollar-a-day commodity trader, buying and selling contracts and their derivatives to deliver natural gas, electricity, internet bandwidth, whatever. The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to put a cap on how much pollutant the operator of a fossil-fueled plant was allowed to emit. In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s proposed carbon credit trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.

Then came the inevitable question, what next? How about a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program? The problem was that CO2 is not a pollutant, and therefore the EPA had no authority to cap its emission. Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects around the world and issue ‘credits’ of so many tons of annual CO2 emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading pollutant credits.

Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem was in place the solution would be trotted out.

Results 1 - 10 of about 31,900 for GE kyoto cap and trade
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=GE+kyoto++cap+and+trade&btnG=Google+Search

Tip of the iceberg:

Obama’s ‘Cap and Trade’ Plan Imposes Huge Tax
by Christopher C. Horner
03/02/2009
In his February 24 speech, President Obama asked Congress to send him “…legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.” But by “market-based cap” he means that the government would mandate carbon dioxide emission permits – which are essentially permits to use energy – that companies would then be able to sell among themselves.

His budget assumes a staggering $650 billion in revenue from this scheme. But who picks up the tab? Who ultimately pays the cost of buying these slices of global warming baloney, and why would industry support such a scheme?

The answer is that you and I do, as does everyone who buys anything requiring energy, just like we pay the cost of all the other taxes paid by manufacturers. It’s a tax, folks. Plain and simple, Obama’s “market-based cap” plan is a tax on American business.

Industry is actually behind this massive tax, having sold their support so that the tax is not merely passed through to consumers, but it allows companies to skim the scheme for a profit, again at your expense.

This tax, however, is nearly twice the size of the failed BTU tax which Al Gore still attributes the Democrats’ loss of Congress the next year.

The BTU tax was offered in the name of deficit reduction. Obama’s global warming tax is expressly to pay for new middle-class welfare entitlements, even though it takes away from the beneficiaries about the same amount they will fork out in increased energy costs (if not the entire inflationary impact). The important point for his movement, however, is that more money is run through the state, creating dependency.

With BTU, the then-new “rock star” Democratic president Clinton was rebuffed by a Democratic Congress once the public fought back. This was only after the House had passed the tax by one vote – cast by Rep. Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky (D-PA), who tearfully marched down to change her vote after being singled out for flipping by the White House. As she shuffled back up the aisle, a prescient Republican caucus loudly waived “bye, Margie!” knowing the gift she had given them. She was among many BTU-tax supporters later driven from office.

Then business successfully “Swiss-cheesed” the tax proposal by lobbying and achieving so many carve-outs that the tax simply collapsed. With an insufficient business constituency, Democratic Sens. Bennett Johnston, John Breaux and David Boren could not justify so angering the public and instructed the new president how the world would work.

There are two lessons here.

First, as Al Gore confessed to the Financial Times, going through the front door of a direct energy tax is too risky. Hence the cap-and-trade rationing scheme; it’s a tax but a non-transparent one, also making it vastly less efficient (more expensive) according to economists at, for example, the Congressional Budget Office. The message to lawmakers is to worry about one job: yours. Hide the tax. The part about also doubling the tax seems to be all Obama’s idea.

Second, cap-and-trade shows that business has also learned how to sell its support in return for additional schemes to further pick your pocket, siphoning of some of the cost to themselves. Cap-and-trade provides them billions of your dollars in return for playing along.

It’s still so ugly that some senators are exploring ways to actually ram through the scheme itself – and not just the assumptions of revenue from it – on the filibuster-proof budget process. This means they need just 50 votes plus Veep Joe Biden, not 60. It also means there would be no public development, meaning “exposure”, of the scheme.

So there remains a chance that the administration and industry have managed to lock this deal down without the taxpayer represented in the room.

If business is going to pass on the tax to consumers – as they always have to do – are businesses supporting this plan to curry favor with Obama? Of course they are. But who are “they”?

Top Companies Behind Obama’s “Global Warming Tax”

General Electric – the folks who brought you the expensive “energy-saving” light-bulbs by government mandate also bought Enron’s windmill business, that being the company which originally hatched this scheme. Beyond windmills GE has redesigned its business lines to capitalize on the energy-scarcity agenda, with little luck to date but counting on a lobbying budget bigger than “big oil”, combined.

And, just by the way, they’re the owners of NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and one of the few American companies that still trades with our most dangerous enemy, Iran.

Utilities – Cap-and-trade creates what is essentially a carbon cartel, restricting the supply and raising the price of fossil energy and thereby creating windfalls for the lucky holders of emission credits. It is surely a coincidence that companies caught engaging in illegal market manipulation — Enron, and electric utilities American Electric Power, Cinergy, Entergy, and Calpine — have been among the most aggressive lobbyists for the Kyoto Protocol or kindred emission trading schemes.

Cinergy’s CEO James Rogers is a Ken Lay protégé who, after merging with and taking the reins of Duke Energy, has added even more muscle to the global warming lobby.

Wall Street — Among the most influential lobbyists for Kyoto-style policy are Wall Street firms planning to make commissions on the purchase and sale of carbon credits. Again surely a coincidence, the players most heavily invested in profiting from a cap-and-trade scheme were among those mostly heavily implicated in last year’s collapse (e.g., Lehman Bros., JP Morgan Chase). The crumbling Bank of America, naturally, is also a leading cheerleader of the scheme.

These firms are the first cohort of what we will continue to identify for you as the companies lobbying for Congress to stick you with a “global warming” tax.

You are now faced with the question of whether to allow your elected representatives to approve one of the largest tax increases in history, raising $650 billion over eight years from mandating then selling “cap-n-trade” carbon dioxide ration coupons.

Under the Obama scheme, billions of dollars of those rationing coupons will be given away to companies supporting the scheme, and their “cost” nonetheless priced into your energy costs. This is precisely how it has worked in Europe, at great economic cost.

Yet all businesses are on the hook for their sheepishness in the face of this long-running, cynical ploy by businesses underwriting the campaign of environmentalist hysteria proclaiming the end of the earth. Some, like NEC Electronics America, have just announced with a sigh that, with California having just adopted a version of this scheme, it appears that their operations there will be pulled back to Japan.

There’s not enough room on that island nation to ship all of our jobs, though China, India, Mexico, South Korea and others have made clear they are waiting to accommodate the rest.

The one thing we do know is that if this doesn’t prove politically to be BTU redux for the Democrats, there’s no room for manufacturing here.

Mr. Horner is author of “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.”

Why Enron Wants Global Warming
by Patrick J. Michaels
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of “The Satanic Gases.”
This article appeared on cato.org on February 6, 2002.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3388

How Enron hyped global warming for profit
The Kyoto Conspiracy (Gore, Enron, Carbon Trading, Global Warming)
Investigate Magazine ^ | March 2006
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/archives/2006/03/investigate_oct_5.html

Enron Gave Big Bucks to Democrats, Backed ‘Global Warming’ Scam
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/1/16/135018.shtml
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Jan. 17, 2002

AES and GE imitate Enron on coal and climate
By: Timothy P. Carney Examiner Columnist 05/26/09 6:19 PM EDT
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/AES-and-GE-imitate-Enron-on-coal-and-climate-46120417.html

A global power company that inherited some of Enron’s coal-fired power plants in Africa has also followed the late energy giant in the effort to profit from climate change legislation.

Virginia-based AES Corp. has partnered with General Electric Co. in peddling greenhouse gas offsets while lobbying for policies to make those offsets valuable the same buy-low, lobby-hard, sell-high strategy tried by Enron. AES simultaneous expansion of coal-fired power in Asia, South America and Africa, however, highlights how environmental regulations can yield profit without necessarily yielding environmental gains.

Before it collapsed in late 2001, Enron was the leading corporate lobbyist for restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Former Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay called on both the Clinton and Bush White Houses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, which one intracompany e-mail declared would be “good for Enron stock.” The company hoped to be the premier dealer in emissions credits that would be required after climate change legislation. Further, Enron’s natural gas pipelines would see increased demand as coal and oil would be made more costly.

At the same time, Enron owned coal-fired power plants in the developing world and was building more. Third World power plants are not covered by Kyoto, and pinching the developed world’s use of coal would make it cheaper to operate the coal plants in Nigeria.

When Enron died, its assets were scattered. Two heirs taking up both Enron’s power generation and its climate change entrepreneurship were General Electric and AES. GE got the windmills, and AES got floating coal-fired power plants off Nigeria’s shores.

AES is currently building a new coal-fired power plant in India with an accompanying coal mine. AES has also just opened a diesel-fired plant in southern Chile, adding to its four Chilean coal-fired plants. Last December, Vietnam’s government announced a joint venture with AES for a coal-fired power project there.

But at home, AES’s joint ventures have a greener hue. AES and GE have formed a company called Greenhouse Gas Services. GHGS invests in technologies aimed at reducing the gases blamed for global warming. Some of these products save money through energy efficiency, but many of them have value only if Congress passes legislation restricting emissions such as the Waxman-Markey bill currently before the House.

GHGS this month registered as a lobbying organization, working on “climate legislation” and operating from AES Arlington offices. AES, meanwhile, recently hired a new lobbying firm, Lighthouse Consulting. Lighthouse and its lead lobbyist, Merribel Ayres, are the organizational firepower behind the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the business coalition led by GE that has spearheaded the push for cap-and-trade climate legislation.

GHGS is particularly sensitive to how climate legislation accounts for “offsets” emissions credits granted for activities, such as tree-planting, that reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the air.

How to account for offsets is a contentious issue. For instance, planting trees absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but much of that CO2 will go back into the air when the tree rots or burns. Massive tree-planting to absorb CO2 could also create land-use problems.

Clearly, the final details on Waxman-Markey are crucial to GHGS. Importantly for environmentalists worried about manmade climate change, what’s best for reducing greenhouse gas emissions isn’t necessarily what’s best for GE, AES or their joint venture.

Companies that lobby for and profit from environmental regulations often get a free pass from critics who otherwise rush to assail corporate profits. As Timothy Noah wrote in Slate seven years ago, “the mere fact that Enron stood to benefit financially from the Kyoto Treaty, and therefore was pushing energetically for its passage, doesn’t in itself constitute an argument against the Kyoto Treaty.”

It’s true that corporate profit and environmental gain aren’t necessarily at odds. But the details of how AES and GHGS plan to turn carbon constraints into profits show how the idealistic goals of the environmentalists can be perverted and undermined by businesses looking to turn green into greenbacks.

Waxman-Markey would drive down the price of the coal AES will burn in Enron’s old Nigerian plants and in AES new Chilean and Vietnamese plants. Simultaneously, if crafted the right way the bill would drive up demand for the carbon offsets the company is selling here through its joint venture with GE
Enron may be long gone, but in AES and GE, its spirit lives on.

Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill stuffed full of unpleasant surprises
By: Examiner Editorial 05/22/09 4:39 AM EDT
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Waxman-Markey-cap-and-trade-bill-stuffed-full-of-unpleasant-surprises-45836042.html

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