Will we ever be rid of this guy?
For those concerned about warming, it’s time for a shift in emphasis. Fortunately, one has already been provided to them by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has done more than any Democrat to keep climate legislation alive this year. His solution: skip the hurricanes and Himalayan glaciers and keep the argument on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on foreign oil, some of that going to terrorists rather than to domestic job creation.
The Washington Post
There are people that claim they are sick and tired of the bipartisanship in D.C. I personally see nothing necessarily wrong with partisanship in government because I tend to view reaching across the aisle as a selling out of your beliefs most of the time and what your constituents elected you for. Graham has tried to play Mr. Uniter throughout his Senate career, but unfortunately keeps choosing the most inopportune times to do so. First there was the big blow back on his support for McCain’s illegal immigration bill, the origin from whence came the nickname Grahamnesty. Now he’s running around the country chapping his lips on the butt of Senator John Kerry (D-MA) over this climate change bill, much to the dismay of many South Carolinians.
Graham is correct that our heavy reliance on foreign oil is a serious issue, but we don’t need to cripple our economy through the Cap and Fraud bill to resolve that problem. We just need to start drilling our own oil which we have plenty of. We need to start building more nuclear power plants, which the Obama administration seems to be warming to. Green energy investments in the private sector have been steadily growing as well. We can do all of these things now without legislation. None of them are illegal.
Instead of barking up the Cap and Fraud tree, Graham should simply be making a public push to pressure the administration to accept these other initiatives and move faster on them. It’s highly unlikely that that the Waxman-Markey bill will ever become law at this point, but there has been talk of the Obama administration going around Congress and instead having the fascist EPA regulate green house gases. This would essentially produce the same economic disastrous results on our nation by an unelected body, which in my opinion is unconstitutional.
A cap-and-trade system necessarily harms the economy because it is designed to raise the cost of energy. Given the current economic crisis, an expensive energy policy is a bad idea.
Almost all acts of economic production are powered by combusting fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), a process that emits greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming. A cap-and-trade system is simply a mechanism to put a price on emissions in order to compel businesses and consumers to emit less. That is, it’s essentially an emissions tax. But greenhouse gas emissions are virtually synonymous with energy use, so it’s actually a roundabout energy tax. In fact, economists agree that the simplest, most efficient way to reduce emissions is a direct tax. Politicians, however, are terrified of the “t-word,” which is why they have embraced a cap-and-trade system.
The numbers are staggering. President Barack Obama’s recently unveiled cap-and-trade plan would raise $645 billion in revenue from the government-run emissions auctions over eight years. Everyone would feel the pinch. Businesses would compensate for higher production costs and diminished markets by slashing jobs. Consumers would have to pay more for energy and energy intensive goods.
Expensive energy is bad enough, but the real danger of a cap-and-trade policy is a global trade war. A cap-and-trade system would give a competitive advantage to industries in countries that aren’t subject to a de facto energy tax. Jobs would flow overseas, but so would emissions, a dynamic known as “carbon leakage.” To prevent this, a broad coalition of industry, labor, and environmental groups have expressed interest in a tariff that would tax the emissions content of imports from countries without stringent climate policies. Naturally, these countries would retaliate if such a tariff were enacted. Protectionism deepened the Great Depression, just as climate protectionism would worsen the current recession.
William Yeatman – Council on Foreign Relations
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