R.I.P., Cap-and-Trade?
Prospects for the revival of cap-and-trade legislation in the upcoming Congress as a tonic for global climate change appear to be going up in smoke.
Democrats anticipate that some package addressing greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s coal-fueled power plants will likely emerge next session. But getting any proposal through the Republican-controlled House is dubious and it’s extremely unlikely that lawmakers will specifically reconsider cap-and-trade.
“Cap-and-trade may reappear in the House of Representatives but it has no chance of passing,” said Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), prime sponsor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2010, which came within an eyelash of being enacted, acknowledged that the form of any legislation looking to tackle climate change remains unclear.
“We have an obligation to our children and future generations to cut our carbon pollution to address this serious issue,” Waxman said. “I am receptive to any approach that can get the job done although I think market-based approaches can be the most effective. I will continue to offer to work with Republicans and Democrats in 2013 in hope that we might still be able to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
Cap-and-trade, which carries the support of President Obama, represents an effort to limit the emissions of the greenhouse gases from power plants. More than 97 percent of the world’s climate researchers believe global warming is both real and man-made, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
Under the plan, the federal government determines an appropriate amount of emissions that can be released and issues permits – also known as carbon credits — to each plant setting a cap on the amount of pollutants they can emit.
In some instances it’s anticipated that some plants won’t be able to meet the government-established pollution limits. Those power generators would then have to purchase – or trade for — permits from other plants that come in under their caps.
In effect, under cap-and-trade, those plants that exceed their allowances are punished financially while those who successfully reduce their emissions are rewarded through the sale of its permits.
Obama proposed funding a cap-and-trade initiative in his 2010 budget. The legislation creating such a system, sponsored by Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), passed the House in 2009 while the chamber was still under Democratic control. But it stalled in a Senate that, despite a Democratic majority, couldn’t withstand a Republican filibuster. Led by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose state, it often is said, runs on coal, the GOP successfully resisted.
Now, the Democratic margin in the Senate has shrunk and Republicans have assumed control in the lower chamber. What’s more, the chairmen of the two House panels that would have jurisdiction over cap-and-trade – Rep. Fred Upton, (R-Mich.) of the Energy & Commerce Committee, and Rep. Doc Hastings, (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — are vocal opponents.
Can someone please remind me who sets the emission targets and why we should accept them as necessary and worth other trade offs…especially other than cap and trade?
Why your trustworthy government apparatchik will set the emissions targets. Feel confident now?
Targets will be set by those standing to make the most money off them.
AGW is nothing more then a scam. The East Anglia data dump proved that. Hundreds of E-mails that discussed how to manipulate the data to support the AGW theory killed AGW for any rational human.
The only AGW supporters left are those that hope to make billions off it and those who treat it as a religion.
No firm scientific basis for support of the theory that humans cause climate change, global warming or whatever you want to call it.
Hopefully this is the kind of legislation that will be killed by the Republican Congress as well as many other stupid policies like Any Gun Control by whatever name or means and then say to Obama look you might have won by whatever dubious means by a bunch of uninformed voters and fraud but guess what we will not consider anything until you start co operating with us IOW Blow it out your ear Bozo!
Um, sorry to burst the bubble, but I believe my stupid home state of California is getting ready to start its own cap and trade nonsense. Let’s hope it is such a failure that it causes everyone else to cool on the idea. Let’s also hope that I can get togather enough money to leave here sometime in the near future.
Calipornia is losing over 2,000 citizens per day. Soon they will be putting up barbed wire and laying minefields to keep those citizens from fleeing. It’s a Socialist thing.
Ugh. I lived in the Seattle area in the late 80′s when Californians migrated there. It changes a place, as they bring their civic ideas and problems with ‘em when they go. So, to where are these Californians fleeing nowadays? I am trying to convince my husband to move to Southwest, from the Northeast, and I’d like to go where conservatives are more prevalent than California liberals.
Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
Some of those will NOT be part of the USA by Summer;
http://globalgrind.com/news/residents-15-states-petition-secede-united-states-obama-re-election-details#ixzz2C6rZl47g
Right no it’s mostly just talk. Planning will start after unemployment hits 15% and the deficit swells to 3x what it is now.
From the practical POV, secession is possible at this point in time. Enough citizens feel they will be better off starting a new country and it can happen.
It is no longer 1860. All the advantages the North had vs the South in 1860 no longer exist.
Most blue staters find the idea of secession unthinkable. There are a lot of unthinkable ideas. Even more people thinking them.
Notice how extreme left democrats say that we must adopt clean and green legislation for the kids and future generations yet they saddle the same future generations with crippling debt. Making those who avoid the prochoice pogams indentured slaves paying bills of their ancestors. That is a crime. Baby Boomers grew up with wealth passed from earlier generations. Generations following the Boomers are progressively not so lucky.
Boomer hatred.
You know that’s a left wing narrative, right?
If you hate the left so much, why do you people insist on spreading their memes for them?
“Boomer Generation”
Birthed by The Greatest, to go down as The Lamest. A shame. And I are one of ‘em.
Hey, don’t blame us Boomers. I’ve been voting against the Raw Deal my whole life. It was the Greatest Generation which forced fdr and lbj on us. And now the newest voting generation… which I call Generation WTF? has saddled us with obama.
Personally I want to rename my Generation the “Sandwich” Generation. We are sandwiched between two generations voting socialist.
I’m a late boomer (56 years old). I must have missed all that inherited wealth.
It’s all moot, since the EPA is regulating CO2 as a “pollutant” anyway.
Isn’t there an ongoing court challenge to that bureaucratic over-reach in progress? I’d say Congress should clarify the law so we aren’t all in trouble for producing so much pollutant, but for the next two, maybe four, years, all we can hope for from Congress is to hold the line and not make something worse.
“Cap-and-trade, which carries the support of President Obama, represents an effort to limit the emissions of the greenhouse gases from power plants. More than 97 percent of the world’s climate researchers believe global warming is both real and man-made, according to the National Academy of Sciences.”
Are you just cut-and-pasting shirt from Kos?
That 97% of climate scientists is a suspect number. In 2009, the American Geophysical Union sent out a climate science survey to 10,157 scientists. The survey requires about 2 minutes to complete, and was limited to one response per recipient. 3,146 recipients returned replies. About 80% of these individuals, or about 25% of those surveyed, answered YES to Question 2: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” This question is very broad and does no necessarily cite CO2 as a cause for any observed warming. 77 of those 3,146 recipients were climate scientists with papers published in peer-reviewed climate science journals. Of these 77 climate scientists, 75 answered YES to Question 2 so the 75 of 77 are the famed 97%. Also remember that Climategates I and II showed that “peer-review” in the climate science journal world is a suspect process. Dr. Larry Bell discusses this situation in detail in his Forbes Magazine column of 17 Jul 2012 “That Scientific Consensus on Global Warming Consensus … Not!”
The other thing that false in that paragraph is the claim that it only affects power plants. Any tax or other punitive measure on carbon must, repeat must, also punish transportation and home heating fuel. You can’t have a “carbon” punishment that only affects coal. It must, repeat must, make gramma’s gas or oil heating bill rise, as well as all transportation costs. This not only means pain for the consumers at the fuel pump, but also public transportation will have to pass this cost on to somebody.
Could this be the early sign of an emerging pattern? A dearly held dream of the progressive getting buried under the ashes of political fatigue? So much political capital has been burned with the forced creation of Obamacare over popular sentiment, is there any combustion potential left for other things? Could the left manage to crystallize conservative opposition to unprecedented levels?
Perhaps the burning of political capital produces too much warmth, and other undesirable things, some of them of atmospheric nature…
The whole AGW scam has two purposes:
1) To keep poor people poor, and to make middle-class people poor, so that those already rich will face less competition for the material treasures of this world.
2) To strangle energy production everywhere except in Muslim oil-producing nations.
Oh, and by the way, here’s something downright creepy going on at the EPA.
Here in Kalifornistan we got yer cap and trade:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/energy-environment/california-manufacturers-weigh-costs-of-new-greenhouse-gas-rules.html?hp
I guess these frauds and freaks will have to come up with another scam to filch power and grub money.
Climate environmentalist cannot fathom that they cannot control the weather – one of the few things in life that has been and probably will remain uncertain and uncontained by regulatory science and governmental fiat. They want – from their rhetoric – to be able to determine that each December the 24th will be the same weatherwise from year to year, decade to decade, century to century. There should not be in their view fluctuations in weather events from year to year, nor variables in seasonal temperatures.
They want to play as gods, as they do with government and with individuals. Thank the gods that be, that this may be the one thing that proves how reckless and inane they really are.
“More than 97 percent of the world’s climate researchers believe global warming is both real and man-made, according to the National Academy of Sciences.”
Bill: state your source at the National Academy of Sciences please. This is hogwash. Give me thier names. I would like to have a word with them.
As an astrophysics student in the day we thought these people promoting AGW were fools. It was virtually unanimous. Their science was either made up or based on a faulty premise. There were no exceptions. These fools were proven wrong then, just as they can easily be proven wrong today.
I have a really, really hard time believing that 97% of the NAS crowd has fallen into the government funded GW scam (notice they dropped the “A”). And a scam it is. It has nothing to do with the climate. Actually, it never did.
The Tower of Babel control freaks will always pursue a path of willful ignorance as long as the outcome is detrimental to rational thinking. It is a given.
Global warming along with global cooling is a fact since the Earth has been undergoing constant cycles of both throughout all of geological history. All those zillions of tons of carbonate rock strata throughout the world is obvious evidence of nature’s own way of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The percentage of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is in dynamic equilibrium with natural processes to remove it, and the tiny amount that humans screw around with is insignificant. The amount of methane (CH4) in the atmosphere is also a concern when considering climate change, but I don’t see Congress passing laws about methane credits. Oops, maybe I shouldn’t give politicians more ideas.
Actually, the amount of water vapor (H2O) in our modern atmosphere is of far more importance in determining “global warming” than is carbon dioxide, so I guess Congress must pass legislation regulating the amounts of lakes, rivers, and backyard swimming pools from which all this nasty water vapor vaporizes.
Actually, so-called “man-made-global-warming” is nonsense since nothing man can do short of a global nuclear war can make any significant difference in climate.
Apparently no one has noticed that all those forest fires last summer throughout the western US released as much or even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than did all man-made sources within the US. Since forest fires do this every year, the US Congress must step in and outlaw forest fires.
Also, one major “snort” by any volcano releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus Congress must outlaw volcanic eruptions.
But, alas, fighting the demon carbon dioxide is big money, so politicians will do nothing but figure new ways to profit from it.
“Cap-and-trade originally was a Republican concept, implemented during the administration of President George H.W. Bush to address sulfur dioxide pollution widely thought to cause acid rain.”
Not “thought to cause acid rain”, dang well DOES cause acid rain. SO2 + (water vapor)H20 -> H2SO4 which is of course a strong acid. QED.
The theory behind CO2 being a primary driver of global climate change, on the other hand, is a crock of unproven junk science crap based mostly on computer models that haven’t even been able to fit the historical curve w/o massaging the data and using unreliable source data. CO2 is NOT a pollutant.
Australia, though holder of 23% of the world’s uranium reserves and second highest producer of uranium in the world, has no nuclear reactors. Australia’s plentiful and inexpensive coal and gas reserves ably argued against nuclear power. Now, Australia, responsible for 1.5% of worldwide carbon emissions, has a carbon tax (July 2012). Carbon tax supporters estimated an 8% increase in costs, across the board, due to the carbon tax; however, it’s now looking more like 18%. I could go on; but, why?
The axiom, upon which Cap & Trade rests, is flawed. It assumes that the market can efficiently allocate costs for something bad, the production of Carbon Dioxide. It represents the collapse of taxation policy, by which taxes are supposedly levied to raise funding for government. C&T simply is a punishment, constructed for social engineering. Depending on your politics, you may favor taxing abortion providers, or gun owners, the number of cuss words in Hollywood movies, or the number of kills in violent electronic games.
Technically, it would make more sense to tax cloud formation, since this too is a climate change actor. Or the several green house emission actors.
It is abundantly clear, from following the UN Conference of the Parties (COP 18 just ended) on climate change, that the central debate is now about the, “loss and damage” which industrialized nation owe the undeveloped nations. If our Congress was rational (a gross assumption on my part) they must factor into C&T the costs due to our industry since the Watts steam engine.
Americans now borrow 47 cents of every dollar the government spends. The entire US post election debate centers on taxation, not reductions to this spending. Yet we are borrowing from a nation that produces twice the CO2 that we produce, China. She, and India, will dwarf our CO2 emissions in the coming years.
Thus the C&T proponents must define the global market costs, for every green house gas, and levied it on every US consumer. And explain why living American taxpayers must pay again, for our WWI, and WWII heavy industry emissions which kept the entire world free, for a century.
I see no rational basis for assigning a price of one ton of CO2 emissions, solely in the US.
USA CO2 output is at 1991 levels.
USA CO2 production is a tiny % of total.CO2 global production.
Why can globalists.get away even trying this? Would enrich the owners of the new version of the Chicago Climate Exchange. What is going on in the USA. Obama says climate exchange is one of his top priorities- what did his voters do?
“We have an obligation to our children and future generations to cut our carbon pollution to address this serious issue,” Waxman said
But we don’t give a crap about spending our kids into oblivion, Waxman thinks.
Everyone I know likes breathing clean air. It gets very hard to listen to someone make suggestions and propose laws that look like the laws will make them rich and cost me more. It is very hard to take people proposing changes seriously when they live in energy guzzling homes and use the most energy inefficient transportation possible. It is very hard to take them seriously when some countries with very serious pollution problems are ignored in international talks.
Your politics and money are telling me more than your words are.
I’m not the Bill who wrote the article, but I did provide the source of the 97% number in a reply to “Who is Richard Windsor?” at Comment #7 above. It is true, however, that in other instances, the NAS seems to be turning into the “NA of Politically Correct S” (NAPCS). It is not good for the country if this organization looses its objectivity.
My entry at Comment #21 was supposed to have been a reply to Comment #13 by Chukalulabus, not a new comment.
” … some evidence exists suggesting that cap-and-trade not only isn’t necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but that it might serve as an impediment to reduction. “. One reason the Dems will be motivated to create this law.
Also, weren’t the rumors of the demise of the dang Affirdable Health Care Act premature as it went on to pass despite the election of Scott Brown.
Sly bastards in Congress ….
Tar, feathers, Congressmen and Senators, rail and directions out of town. Some assembly required.
That ought to stop the torrent of new and onerous laws from continuing to rain down upon us….. Have mercy!
I’m quite upset at Mr. Obama for not pushing harder on this topic – and for not standing up for environmental stewardship in general. I’d like to believe that the 2012 election will change his attitude on the climate issue, but I’m not terribly optimistic at this point. That’s why I’m concentrating entirely on the 2014 House midterm elections as an opportunity to regain Congressional power for a proactive climate policy.
Karl, there is no AGW. Humans DO NOT cause climate change. For you Environmentalism is a religion, for normal people it is a scam.
Karl it is inevitable that a Liberal will be disappointed in his elected Messiah.
Not only on Global Warming; Obama has also failed to pay your mortgage and replace Joe Biden with Big Bird.