The Foundry

The Los Angles Times did something The New York Times shamelessly did not. The “times” on the left-leaning West Coast at lease admitted that all the recent hub-hub linking national security to global warming is all about politics as usual in Washington, DC. “It’s a deliberate, anxiety-themed effort,” the paper reported, “to press a handful of fence-sitting moderates to support a [Waxman-Markey] bill that will probably be the administration’s next great legislative push after health care.” That admission is certainly more than the Big Apple paper acknowledged when it shamelessly ran a similar story on the impact of climate change on national security a few weeks ago. At least the LA Times gave some inches to both sides of the story, even citing research from The Heritage Foundation.

The truth is regardless of which side of the argument you come down on regarding how shifting weather will affect us, the Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” Bill is a really bad idea….because it will completely undermine our ability to deal with future national security threats.

A study by our Center for Data Analysis finds that the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill would make the United States about $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. Much of this decline would be from reduced economic productivity and job loss.

A collapse in U.S. economic growth would result in even more draconian cuts to the defense budget, leaving America with a military much less prepared to deal with future threats. Indeed, if America’s military power declines, there would probably be more wars, not fewer. Likewise, a steep drop in American economic growth would lengthen and deepen the global recession. That in turn will make other states poorer, undermining their ability to protect themselves and recover from natural disasters.

Waxman-Markey is the precursor to a real doomsday scenario.