The Msbegotten Public Option

Commentary Magazine ^ | 06/28/2009 | John Steele Gordon

[fiscon1]

The Cap-and-Trade bill that passed the House yesterday will be a declaration of war on the American economy if it ever is enacted into law. It is ostensibly supposed to help the American economy transition from the old, carbon-based industrial economy to the broad, sunlit (and presumably unpolluted) uplands of a post-industrial one. According to an infomercial masquerading as an AP news story, the “climate bill may spur energy revolution.” Overlooked by the AP and other minions of the left is the fact that that revolution has been underway, largely without the federal government’s help, for more than a generation now. In 1970 a one-percent increase in GDP meant a one-percent increase in oil consumption.

[ClearCase_guy]

Cap-and-Trade is not about energy. Simple as that.

[alloysteel]

Cap and Trade is “pixie dust”, the stuff of fairy tales and mid-summer’s night dreams. While there have been some breakthroughs on lowering energy requirements to accomplish a task more efficiently, this has NEVER come about through a legislative act, but from listening to the market place. This “Cap and Trade” totally ignores the realities of an open and free market, creating and dictating a new and totally artificial “market” in hype and coercion.

Enron was a bad idea in the 1990’s and it still is. This is Enron II on steroids. Backed up with the police power of the Federal Government. Comply, or we take punitive steps.

For at least several centuries into the future, the MAJORITY of our energy needs to drive our civilization will come from the combustion of carbon-based fuels - it is just the nature of the beast. Carbon-based fuels are compact, relatively easy to transport, and the emissions from them have a benificial effect, though there are those who refuse to accept the SETTLED science of conversion of carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into carbohydrates and free atmospheric oxygen. If carbon-based substances are NOT converted to carbon dioxide, the great circle of life is interrupted, and the world dies, or at least its oxygen-breathing carbon-based life forms do.

Oxygen is a highly corrosive, destructive substance that could not exist in abundance in our atmosphere for any length of time in the absence of the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbohydrate compounds, by photosynthesis, a natural blessing of the sunlight that falls upon the good and wicked alike.

Oxygen. Use it wisely, for it is a fearsome master, fueling one of the most destructive forces of history - fire.