BARTON: Sending us back to 1875 - Washington Times
Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That’s the last time Americans’ carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation.
What, the old DeLorean is up on cinder blocks in the front yard again? In that case you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO2 emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America’s to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO2 level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that has actually achieved it is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. So excuse me if I remain unconvinced.
Obama wants to turn the United States into Haiti!
And if the GOP and/or conservatives were serious about opposing him, they’d turn that message into a viral meme posthaste.
So, say it again: “Obama wants to turn the United States into Haiti.”
Then say it, email it, text it, or IM it to a friend.
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Hold on now! There’s not necessarily a causal link between Haiti’s carbon emissions and its screwed up economy, society, and education. Saying that Obama wants to turn us into Haiti is a nasty smear reminiscent of the worst that the far Left spewed at Bush for eight years. There’s no need to resort to such dirty tricks in order to attack Obama’s destructive economic policies, nor is it ethical.
Don’t forget that Haiti’s environment is just as sick as its population.
Well, if we:
1) replaced all of our oil, gas and especially coal electric plants with nuclear power plants (and a few hydro projects, notably in Quebec)…
2) at the same time increased total electric power production and added long-distance electric transmission lines, keeping electric rates from going up in most places…
3) a) instituted a modest carbon tax, b) offset by the elimination (or reduction to ~12.5%) of the corporate income tax and by keeping the marginal income taxes and inheritance taxes from going up as they now appear likely to do…
4) had mostly plug-in hybrid vehicles charging up mostly at night, and more electric buses and trains running off overhead wires or electric rails…
5) and replaced most home furnaces with electric heaters or heat pumps…
then we might attain such emissions levels without much cost in economic growth. Not that most on the left are willing to do #1, #2 or #3b.
The bill sets impossible standards, and it is impossible to use offsets - reforestation may not be an acceptable offset.
It is my opinion that the intent of the bill is to bankrupt the energy industry so it can be nationalized.
You really think he’s aiming as high as Haiti for America’s fate?
There is no such thing as global warming! Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Could we please stop with the big lie???? Why do left wingers want to cause the destruction of the very wealth that allows us to clean the environment, provide for the poor and to avoid a breakdown of society into tribalism and the survival of the strongest?
Um…unless you’re being deliberately somewhat obtuse (and/or trolling)…you seem to have pretty much entirely missed the point…
Quite aside from the highly-arguable questions of whether a) human-source “global warming” is actually occurring to an environmentally-harmful extent, and b) said “global warming” is largely (or entirely) due to human-sourced carbon dioxide, said point is:
1) The Obamanation’s proposed legislation would impose levels of “permissible” carbon emissions that would, inevitably, produce severe regression in the U.S. economy, and…
2) To achieve the proposed levels by the projected time (i.e., by 2050), the level of regression would approach a point last seen in the U.S. circa 1875 - which would almost cetainly produce similar levels of economic and societal disruption and disfunction similar to that currently found in some third-world nations…such as Haiti…
Do the math…then, if you have some useful, practical proposal to offer that would look better than that outlook, please explain it.
DWPittelli - If there is a viable way to get carbon down to the proposed level but Obama isn’t willing to pursue it, this means that he is in favor of the default result, massive economic backsliding and a crumbling infrastructure that will make us resemble Haiti. I don’t see Obama standing up for a lot of the necessary restructuring to avoid that fate so it’s a fair attack.
I think that that’s the point. If you set realistic standards, then they might be met, which solves the problem, which alleviates the need to government involvement, which is exactly what these legislators are hoping to prevent.
Climate change regulation is a ideal device for overcoming traditional impediments to government control. It can be applied to nearly all domains of human activity. And very few people know enough about the subject to evaluate the claims of its promoters. So it’s like a blank check.
“Papa Doc” Obama?
Mr Anonymous,
I am agreeing with you that Obama is not being realistic, mostly because he will not make nuclear power a large part of his overhaul of the energy sector. (He did once make some rather ambiguous statements about keeping it on the table, but we all know he won’t favor it in anything like the way his industrial planning favors other, less practical means to his varied ends, such as subsidies for solar power, or Presidential fiat replacing our bankruptcy laws.)