Buried deep within the President’s tax plan is a proposal to “reauthorize the special assessment from domestic nuclear utilities.” Translation: The President wants to place an additional tax on nuclear utilities that will result in higher energy prices for consumers. The United States gets 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. So what the President characterizes as a $2 billion “savings” over 10 years is really a $200 million annual price increase for the millions of American consumers who rely on nuclear energy. The money would be placed into …
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 …
Senators Kerry and Lieberman have introduced their “compromise” climate change legislation that relies largely on a “cap and trade” scheme to reduce carbon emissions. Even assuming there was a need for carbon limits, the Kerry-Lieberman bill gets the mechanism all wrong, apparently because the Senators either don’t understand or don’t trust markets. Kerry and Lieberman propose that the government manage a carbon market because controlling pollution is really important. This will work about as well as the government running grocery stores because everyone needs food. The insight underlying the use …
The state of California likes to sell itself as a leader in the transition to a green economy. The only problem is, their policies are making that transition harder—and they’re not producing the job boom that politicians have been promising. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) recently reviewed the impact of the state’s 2006 climate change legislation, which mandated a cut in GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. A letter from the LAO to the state senator that requested the analysis stated that the aggregate net jobs impact of …
The House of Representatives is prepared to pass the President’s energy tax, also known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act – or “ACES”. ACES is a fitting name for this particular bill, because it gambles with the future of the American people. In Blackjack, the dealer might have an ace showing, but one card in the dealer’s hand is always hidden. In this case, the hidden card is the real costs of this bill to the American taxpayer. What the taxpayer doesn’t know is that the odds for …
