Betrayed by Congress with the Cap-and-Trade Bill

Betrayed by Congress with the Cap-and-Trade Bill South Orange, NJ Saturday, June 27, 2009

Mark it on your calendar, June 26, 2009 was the date that the House of Representatives betrayed every American in the name of saving the nation and the Earth from global warming.

It was the day that 219 Representative voted for the obscenely misnamed "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" Only eight Republican members of the House voted for it and 44 Democrats voted against it.

The bill, some 1,200 pages, was not read by those men and women voting on it because they were not permitted the time to do or have their staffs do it. The co-author of the bill, Rep. Henry Waxman, admitted that even he did not know its full contents.

The vote was not based on science, on economics, or simple common sense. It was an exercise in raw political power exercised by the Speaker of the House and her minions.

The bill puts limits on the generation of "greenhouse gases", primarily carbon dioxide, setting up an elaborate scheme for the sale and trade of so-called carbon credits that will ultimately be the equivalent of the bundled housing mortgage securities that produced the present threat to the nation's financial system. It is a get-rich scheme that will benefit a few while penalizing every American with higher costs for electricity.

The limits are justified by the claim that the Earth is dramatically warming due to too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Earth has been cooling for the last ten years and is predicted to continue cooling for thirty years or more. Carbon dioxide plays no role in the warming or cooling of the Earth.

The bill is a direct attack on the nation's coal industry. Fifty percent of all the electricity generated nationwide comes from coal-fired plants. The U.S. has deposits of coal sufficient to meet the nation's needs for hundreds of years. It is cheap and it is abundant. No new coal-fired plants will be built in America in the foreseeable future. Coal that is not utilized here will be exported to China, a nation that is building new coal-fired plants and opening them on a weekly basis to meet its need for power.

The bill also allocates billions for the development of the two worst, most inefficient and unpredictable sources of electricity, wind and solar energy. Presently, these represent barely one percent of all the electricity generated in the nation. There is no way, nor should they be, they can replace coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as a source of electricity. They are also the alleged source of "green" jobs.

As for "security", a nation that cannot access its own sources of energy, coal, oil and natural gas, has no security if it must import them from other nations, some of whom are hostile to our values and system of government. The bill puts our fate in the hands of nations that support the goals of Islamic global domination. It puts the nation at the mercy of men like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and explains why President Obama made a deep bow to a Saudi prince earlier this year.

The bill must now go to the Senate where it is hoped that the upper body, though controlled by Democrats, will ensure it does not move on to the desk of the President.

If it passes in the Senate, the beginning of the actual decline of America as a great economy will be dated June 26, 2009.

Without abundant power, electricity for our homes, offices and factories; without gasoline for our cars and trucks, America will become a failed nation.

Caruba, the founder of The National Anxiety Center, blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

FELLOW TENNESSEANS and others who want a good laugh or cry:

Here is the BS form letter I got yesterday after emailing Rep BART GORDON of Tennessee.. Democrat of course.

Here it is in its entirety.

Enjoy.

Dear Mr. X,

Thank you for sharing your concerns about H.R. 2454 the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES).

I have given this legislation a lot of thought. Although it is not perfect, I am convinced this bill is not only good for working families in Middle Tennessee, but vital to our region's economic future. This is just the start of the legislative process that will allow more review and an opportunity to improve the bill. The merits of this legislation have been heavily distorted, and I want to take this opportunity to lay out the truth behind the bill and help you understand how I reached my decision.

In 2007 the Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. If Congress does not act on the issue, the EPA is required to act, and will do so in a way that is less likely to take into account the individual challenges each region of the country faces. The Senate drafted several bills in response to this mandated action to solve the CO2 problem, but I believe their bills were impractical. The Senate bills produced cost estimates from $1,000 to $3,000 a year per household. These costs are unacceptable.

ACES is different. Energy companies, environmental groups, and business groups all had a seat at the table to negotiate this bill. After taking into account the challenges the country was facing and the comments and concerns of these groups, the Energy and Commerce Committee wrote a bill that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (the same group that reported the costs of the Senate bills) says will cost $175 a year for families at its height in 2020 or about $15 a month. These costs will be more than offset by the savings in energy efficiency each household will achieve annually, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be created.

I hear all the time from Tennesseans who are upset about high utility bills As Chair of House Science and Technology Committee I've heard from experts and studied the issue to see what relief can be provided. For example, I learned that a significant amount of our monthly electrical bills goes to energy we're not even using. Because of inefficiencies in the 50-year old electric grid, some energy doesn't make it into our homes, while the energy that does is often used inefficiently. This bill upgrades the grid, an action expected to save 7% on utility bills.

This is not just a climate bill. This is a jobs and energy independence bill. The 6th District is projected to gain more than 4500 jobs directly because of this legislation. These jobs aren't all engineers and scientists. Half of these new jobs will be blue-collar, manufacturing jobs that do not require a high school diploma. Tennessee is hurting right now. Our unemployment rate is more than 10% statewide. The fact of the matter is, a lot of the jobs we've lost are not coming back and we've got to think outside the box if we're going to revive our manufacturing sector.

China is now the world's leading exporter of wind technology, and they continue to invest heavily in green jobs. Meanwhile, our region is hemorrhaging jobs overseas. If we give up this industrial sector to foreign business, we will never regain leadership in this arena. The cost of inaction is that we will be purchasing these technologies from foreign plants and employing foreign workers. Tennessee will soon be home to 3 billion-dollar solar plants. Nissan recently announced a two billion-dollar investment in electric vehicle manufacturing at its Smyrna plant. Make no mistake, Tennessee is a green jobs state, and the jobs ACES creates will be Tennessee jobs. We'll need everything from mechanics to build wind turbines, to truck drivers to transport products, to carpenters to install solar panels for these jobs.

Oil prices are rising, and working families are already paying more than they can afford on gas. The United States imports over 60 percent of the oil we consume, making our national security and economy increasingly vulnerable to unfriendly regimes and terrorist threats. ACES will put us on the road to energy independence by driving the development of home-grown fuels and reducing our consumption of foreign oil. We'll no longer be hostage to the gas price spikes that have become a summer tradition.

I take seriously your concerns about this legislation. At the end of the day though, I believe the need to reduce our dependence on foreign energy, the need to create green energy jobs, and the need to mitigate climate change required moving the process forward for the benefit of the working families of Tennessee. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future if I may be of assistance to you or your family.

Stay in touch,

BART GORDON Member of Congress

One by one, I contacted EVERY Senator and sent the following vessage:

Open letter to Members of the Senate:

You don't read and you don't understand the bills you are voting on? Then you are failing and failing badly, at another reading and understanding - the temper of the voting public.

What is the purpose of the House of Representatives and the Senate, anyway? All the issues surrounding the application and administration of these massive tomes of proposed legislation should be debated, and if they cannot be debated, they should be deleted before the bill itself is presented.

Enron went into the tank for a far less ambitious scheme than "Cap and Trade". And people moaned about how badly they had been treated then. Bernie Madoff was a piker compared to the size of this "Tax and Kill", which is a pernicious and regressive consumption tax that not only hits the lower strata of income totally disproportionately, it shall be practically impossible for anyone on the bottom quintile to ever leave that level.

I guess that is some kind of "freedom", just another way to say you got nothing left to lose.

Congress is about to shoot us in the foot. We might not bleed out, but we are sure going to be pretty lame for a long time.

Only Senator Arlen Specter was impossible to contact, as attempting to open his website sent me to a swirl of gibberish and his email address was no longer active.

There was no Senator Al Franken.

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