Obama's Cap And Trade Policy: An Urgent Need to Save the Planet or Collect More Taxes?

Program is more about income redistribution than saving the environment!

New poll shows the manufactured crisis for action on global warming is wearing thin!

Every manufactured crisis has a sell by date. That date for the global warming scare is arriving shortly. The latest Gallup Poll shows a dramatic rise in the number of people who believe the scare over global warming is “exaggerated.” That explains why Democrats are ramping up the scaremongering on global warming as they prepare to ram Obama's cap and trade policy through Congress. The longer they wait the more people will learn what a fraud global warming is.

As part of that orchestrated campaign:

Democratic Senator John Kerry warned on Wednesday that deferring potentially costly actions to combat climate change because of the global economic slump amounted to "a mutual suicide pact." "Climate change is not governed by a recession, it's governed by scientific facts about what's happening to Earth. And you either accept the realities of the science or you don't," Kerry said .

Kerry spoke one day after the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (program PDF, Highlights) had concluded in New York. The number of attendees at this year's conference was double that from 2008 with hundreds of scientists and political leaders in attendance. Interestingly, their views of what Kerry calls the "realities of the science " is somewhat different.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic told the Conference on Sunday that the real motivation behind the great global warming scare are the "political rent-seekers... interested neither in temperature, carbon dioxide, competing scientific hypotheses and their testing, nor in freedom or markets. They are interested in their businesses and their profits--made with the help of politicians."

It's About MONEY, Not the Environment!

Like most other things in life, it's all about the money. And there's is big money to be made in the global warming fraud. And government is no exception. Obama's plan for cap and trade is not designed to save the environment. It won't significantly reduce CO2 emissions, but it will significantly increase energy costs paid by the consumer.

Who Pays for Cap and Trade?
Hint: They were promised a tax cut during the Obama campaign.
The Wall Street Journal
MARCH 9, 2009

Cap and trade is the tax that dare not speak its name, and Democrats are hoping in particular that no one notices who would pay for their climate ambitions. With President Obama depending on vast new carbon revenues in his budget and Congress promising a bill by May, perhaps Americans would like to know the deeply unequal ways that climate costs would be distributed across regions and income groups.

Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing "polluters," not workers. Hardly. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity -- in this case the right to emit carbon -- and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter Orszag -- now Mr. Obama's budget director -- told Congress last year that "Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program."

Hit hardest would be the "95% of working families" Mr. Obama keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat "unless you use energy." Putting a price on carbon is regressive by definition because poor and middle-income households spend more of their paychecks on things like gas to drive to work, groceries or home heating.
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But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels -- particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, Southern and Plains states. It's no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade -- Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey -- come from California or the Northeast.

Coal provides more than half of U.S. electricity, and 25 states get more than 50% of their electricity from conventional coal-fired generation. In Ohio, it totals 86%, according to the Energy Information Administration. Ratepayers in Indiana (94%), Missouri (85%), New Mexico (80%), Pennsylvania (56%), West Virginia (98%) and Wyoming (95%) are going to get soaked.

Another way to think about it is in terms of per capita greenhouse-gas emissions. California is the No. 2 carbon emitter in the country but also has a large economy and population. So the average Californian only had a carbon footprint of about 12 tons of CO2-equivalent in 2005, according to the World Resource Institute's Climate Analysis Indicators, which integrates all government data. The situation is very different in Wyoming and North Dakota -- paging Senators Mike Enzi and Kent Conrad -- where every person was responsible for 154 and 95 tons, respectively. See the nearby chart for cap and trade's biggest state winners and losers.

Democrats say they'll allow some of this ocean of new cap-and-trade revenue to trickle back down to the public. In his budget, Mr. Obama wants to recycle $525 billion through the "making work pay" tax credit that goes to many people who don't pay income taxes. But $400 for individuals and $800 for families still doesn't offset carbon's income raid, especially in states with higher carbon use.
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Cap and trade, in other words, is a scheme to redistribute income and wealth -- but in a very curious way. It takes from the working class and gives to the affluent; takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida; and takes from an industrial America that is already struggling and gives to rich Silicon Valley and Wall Street "green tech" investors who know how to leverage the political class.

The cap and trade argument makes the assumption that if energy costs more people will use less of it. Will workers now drive to their jobs 4 days a week instead of five? Will we heat or cool our homes six days a week instead of seven? Those of us already conserving because of high gas prices will be stuck with paying more in taxes to be given to people who work less.

John Stossel of ABC's program 20/20 debunks the global warming fraud in this short video: