President Barack Obama reiterated his promise to impose invasive and strict carbon caps on our nation’s economy last night. He failed to mention what effect they would have on our nation’s economic recovery. Fortunately for the rest of the nation, but unfortunately for them, California has already adopted strict new carbon capping rules. The result? They are a jobs killer. The New York Times reports:

Only a few years ago, CalPortland planned on keeping its plant here operating as long as Mount Slover’s limestone held out. … But the company says the plant’s future is now uncertain. The recession has sent cement prices plunging, lowered profits and forced CalPortland’s drivers to cut back on hours. And the company says it faces new expenses: the cost of meeting California’s new requirements that manufacturers take steps to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming.

State regulators have projected that retrofitting the state’s 11 cement plants would cost $220 million and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12 percent per ton of cement. But CalPortland’s executives say it would cost more than that to retrofit the Colton plant alone.

“We don’t have enough limestone left to invest $200 million,” said James A. Repman, the company’s president.

The key to this story are the completely unreliable cost predictions by the state. When the left tries to cram the world’s biggest carbon tax down the throats of the American public, they are going to have tons of “scientific” studies claiming to show that carbon capping will be a net gain for the economy. As California’s experience shows, these studies the left puts out are worthless. The New York Times reports:

State regulators predicted in an economic analysis last fall that the climate law would create 100,000 jobs in the state and increase per-capita income by $200 annually by 2020. The upfront cost for the first five years after the law takes effect, they estimated, would be $31.4 billion, about $8.5 billion more than the savings in those years. But if carbon-control costs were spread over the lifespan of the new equipment, the $25 billion in annual costs in the year 2020 would be more than offset by $40 billion in savings.

But the projections were strongly criticized as unrealistic by the affected industries and by independent economists who reviewed the analysis — including two from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which supports the emission reduction goals.

In one withering review, Matthew E. Kahn of the University of California, Los Angeles said the analysis unconvincingly portrayed the law as “a riskless free lunch.” Another economist, Robert N. Stavins of Harvard, said the regulators were “systematically biased” in ways “that lead to potentially severe underestimates of costs.”

All of the left’s “green job” claims are nothing but phantom job creation. Carbon capping is a jobs killer, not a jobs creator.