Congress has passed a massive “cap and trade” energy bill designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. in order to reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17 percent by 2020 and by 83 percent by 2050.
President Barack Obama has called the bill a “jobs bill.” But sentencing the U.S. economy to high-cost energy is not a particularly good strategy for creating jobs. Charles River Associates, a Harvard-based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of about 2.5 million jobs each year.
During the campaign, candidate Obama also pledged that he would never raise taxes in any form on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But his cap and trade tax is estimated to cost American families almost $2,000 a year when it becomes effective—due to higher prices for electricity, oil, gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, coal, food and transportation costs—to almost $7,000 a year for a family of four by 2035.
The rationale for this bill is to counter global warming by sharply reducing greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. But even if the bill works exactly as envisioned, environmentalist advocates admit that it will only slow temperature increases 9/100th of one degree Fahrenheit by 2050! That’s because humans produce less than 5 percent of all CO2 emissions. Indeed, cows are responsible for more greenhouse gases than humans, according to a recent United Nations report.
Worst of all, the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined over the last 11 years, with the downward trend accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades. In fact, our current accelerating temperature decline correlates with an extended trend of slowing sunspot activity, which may portend another Little Ice Age, as happened from the early 1400s to the late 1800s.
But environmentalists and the left are demanding cap and trade. So politics, not good science and certainly not good economics, now appear to be driving the push for cap and trade.