Last Thursday, a who’s who of the progressive movement met for a conference call organized by Families USA and hosted by the advocacy group for government-run health care, The Herndon Alliance. The Alliance’s partners include AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, MoveOn and La Raza, among many others. Democratic pollsters John Anzalone, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg were the call’s main event, and they were there to deliver some bad news. Politico reports: “Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, …
As many predicted, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D–NV) new energy bill contains neither a cap-and-trade program nor a renewable electricity standard (RES). But in a complete change of direction, the bill has made coal, the nemesis of the cap and trade/RES crowd, an alternative fuel. So now, to the list of politically correct alternatives such as wind and solar, we can now add coal. In addition to the bill’s plethora of subsidies, tax credits, and other “incentives” to increase the production of electric vehicles, the bill, according to a draft …
The Senate just released its proposed legislative response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Fortunately, earlier efforts to load the spill bill down with extremely costly and unrelated measures like cap and trade have given way to a more targeted approach. Nonetheless, the bill still contains a number of problematic provisions, and in any event comprehensive legislation is premature at this time as there is much more that needs to be learned about the causes of the spill. At the very least, Senators should refrain from the instinct to “do …
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced an energy bill without a cap-and-trade provision—a victory for the American economy. Yet, like the famous Miracle Max scene in The Princess Bride, cap-and-trade is only “mostly dead.” In a year when seemingly-dead legislation has suddenly come back to life, it is premature for Americans to dance a victory dance that their economy has been spared. Even small victories in Washington are followed closely by new battles. We must remain watchful for cap and trade to return later in the year, stay focused …
In the midst of a crisis in the Gulf, some Senators are making a final push to pass energy and climate legislation this year. Senators John Kerry (D–MA) and Joe Lieberman (I–CT) are introducing a scaled-back version of their original cap-and-trade bill but still want to maintain a carbon cap. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) wants to bring an energy bill up for debate the week of July 26 that addresses the oil spill response and a greenhouse gas reduction plan for utilities only. A draft leaked from Senator …
Here’s a principles-of-economics question: Suppose the U.S. gross domestic product (national income) is currently $14 trillion. Then suppose the U.S. raised all tariff, income tax, and sales tax rates to 100 percent. How much money would the government collect? If you realized that nobody would generate taxable income under such a regime and answered “zero,” congratulations. If, instead, you answered $14 trillion, you may have a future at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), because that is how they analyze (score) the fiscal impacts of the Kerry–Lieberman climate change bill. In …
For environmentalists to get the carbon dioxide cuts they desire, they need people to dramatically change their behavior. After all, the goal of cap and trade is to increase the cost of energy (85% of which comes from carbon-emitting fossil fuels), in order for demand to fall. But the radical environmental ideas extend well beyond cap and trade and come from all parts of the globe. This is nothing more than a group of elitists who believe they possess a moral authority to tell others how to live. The latest …
President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas. That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess. So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill? Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak. The answer can be found in Obama Chief …
The Environmental Protection Agency released its economic analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman cap and trade legislation, the latest cap and trade bill to be released in the Senate. The result was nearly the same as the EPA’s analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill passed in the House of Representatives last year: postage stamp per day costs. Instead of $176 per household for Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Lieberman would cost households $146 by 2050. Unfortunately for Americans, nothing substantial in the EPA analysis has changed; it is still unreasonable, faulty, and fragile. The …
President Barack Obama delivered his first Oval Office speech on the heels of his latest visit to the Gulf region – the fourth since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April. With such an environmental and economic crisis present, the president needs to exert leadership to protect our precious coastal resources and clean up the spill. His message was the wrong one. Instead, he continued to politicize the crisis by pushing for cap and trade legislation and to establish a separate claims fund – financed by BP – that will …
