New study documents harmful effects of “cap-and-trade” and “endangerment” schemes
Guest post by Paul Driessen
Environmental justice demands that the United States address global warming, the gravest threat facing minority Americans, insist the EPA, Congressional Black Caucus and White House. Are they serious?
The alleged threat pales next to unwed teen motherhood, school dropouts, murder and other crime. But even assuming human carbon dioxide emissions will cause average global temperatures to rise a few degrees more than they have already since the Little Ice Age ended, it is absurd to suggest that any such warming would harm minorities more than policies imposed in the name of preventing climate change.
Human activities have not replaced the complex natural forces that drove climate change throughout Earth’s history. But even if manmade greenhouse gases do contribute to planetary warming, slashing US emissions to zero would bring no benefit, because steadily rising emissions from China, India, Brazil and other rapidly growing economies would almost instantly replace whatever gases we cease emitting.
Most important, fossil fuels power the economic engine that ensures justice and opportunity in America today. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable reduce business revenues and profits, shrink investment and innovation, imperil economic recovery, and hobble job creation, civil rights, and the pursuit of happiness and the American dream.
Whether they take the form of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, restrictions on drilling and coal mining, or EPA rules under its claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare, anti-energy policies frustrate the natural desire of poor and minority Americans to improve their lives.
As to coping with higher temperatures, restrictive energy policies send electricity prices skyrocketing, making it harder for low-income households to afford air conditioning, and putting lives at risk. They send poor families back to pre-AC misery of bygone eras, like the 1896 heat wave that killed 1,300 people in New York City’s sweltering tenements. In wintertime, they make heating less affordable, again putting lives at risk.
I recently documented the connection between energy policies and civil rights. My “Justice through Affordable Energy for Wisconsin” report focuses on the Dairy State, where I grew up. However, its lessons apply to every state, especially the 26 that get 48-98% of their electricity from coal or have a strong manufacturing base. (The full report can be found at www.CFACT.org)
Energy is the foundation for America’s jobs, living standards, and everything we make, grow, eat, wear, transport and do. Climate change bills, energy taxes and renewable energy mandates deliberately restrict supplies of reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy – sending shockwaves through the economy.
Fossil fuels generate three-fourths of Wisconsin’s electricity, keeping costs low and enabling its $45-billion-a-year manufacturing sector to compete in a tough global marketplace. Hydrocarbons sustain thousands of jobs in agriculture, tourism and other sectors of the state’s economy. They ensure that hospitals and clinics can offer high-tech diagnostic, surgical and treatment services.
They enable school districts, families, churches, shops and government offices to operate in the black. Soaring fuel and electricity prices would force schools to spend millions more for buses, heating and lighting. That would mean higher taxes – or reduced music, sports, language and special education programs. Poor and minority neighborhoods would be impacted worst.
Small and minority businesses are often young and undercapitalized. Increasing their operating costs, while decreasing the disposable income of their customers, puts them on the verge of bankruptcy.
“A single worker in our Rhinelander fabrication plant can do the work of ten who do not have access to cranes, welding machines, plasma burners and all other machinery that allows us to cut, bend and fabricate steel up to six inches thick, and make all kinds of heavy equipment,” says Oldenburg Group executive vice president Tim Nerenz. But the machinery and facilities are energy-intensive. If energy costs rise, the company would have to cut wages and benefits or lay off workers, as contract prices are fixed and overseas competition is fierce.
Indoor pools and other facilities make tourism a year-round industry, sustaining local economies during frigid Wisconsin winters, making resorts like the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells popular jumping-off points for cross country skiing, snowmobiling and dining. Rising energy costs would reduce family vacations, hammer bottom lines, force layoffs, and cause foreclosures throughout these communities.
In every case, it is blue-collar workers, low and moderate income families, minorities and the elderly that are affected most severely.
Nor are these impacts likely to be offset by “green” jobs. As Spain, Germany and other countries have discovered, wind and solar power require constant infusions of money from increasingly strapped taxpayers and energy consumers. When the economy sours, the subsidies disappear, and so do the jobs.
Wind and solar electricity is expensive, intermittent and unreliable – necessitating expensive gas-powered backup generators, and further damaging family and business budgets. Plus, most of the jobs will be in China and India, where low energy and labor costs, and access to rare earths and other raw materials that America refuses to mine, supply wind turbine and solar panel factories that easily under-price US firms.
The entire cap-tax-and-trade, renewable energy and green-jobs edifice is a house of cards, propped up by claims that humans are affecting the Earth’s climate. As EPA and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson repeatedly assert, “Climate change is already happening, and human activity is a contributor.”
However, that is not the issue. The issue is whether our use of fossil fuels is now the dominant factor in global warming and cooling, and whether future manmade climate change will be catastrophic. There is no replicable or credible evidence to support that proposition.
Headline-grabbing disaster scenarios forecast for 50 or 100 years in the future are the product of speculation, assumptions, unreliable computer models, and articles by climate activists falsely presented as peer-reviewed scientific papers in IPCC reports, news stories and political speeches. As my Wisconsin study explains, they are not supported by actual data and observations regarding historic and current global temperatures, ice caps, glaciers, sea levels, rainforests or cyclical weather patterns.
Energy taxes and subsidies, renewable energy mandates, soaring prices for everything we need – and severe impacts on families, businesses, jobs, opportunities, living standards and basic civil rights – might be justified if we did indeed face a manmade climate disaster. But even then we should carefully examine the costs and benefits of any proposed actions.
We should determine whether slashing fossil fuel use will stabilize our planet’s ever-turbulent climate, and whether our limited resources might be better spent on adapting to future changes, natural and manmade, just as our ancestors did.
If global warming science is inaccurate, dishonest, slanted or fraudulent, there is even less justification.
We cannot have justice without opportunity, or opportunity without energy. We cannot have justice by sharing scarcity, poverty and skyrocketing energy prices more equally – especially on the basis of erroneous, speculative or manipulated climate science.
We must therefore be forever vigilant, to ensure that Congress does not slip cap-tax-and-trade proposals through during a post-election lame-duck session – and EPA does not shackle our economy and civil rights progress with its job-killing “endangerment” rules.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
To Paul Driessen, I could not agree more.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/ab-32-hypocrisy-vs-health-and-poverty.html
I don’t think Lisa Jackson want’s ‘justice’ for the inner cities. I think she wants ‘privileges’.
The new phrase or crime is environmental justice. Whites have placed polution sources near poor black communities and every thing hurts. Higher crime, more sickness and lower IQ’s.
Why should health and welfare be interesting to the current administration. They are concerned with change and change they are achieving. A stagnate economy with business afraid to hire for fear of more regulation and higher energy costs is the change they have achieved. The voters that swept this administration may not have known what change was coming into their home. Cap and trade as China and India economies soar, that is change you can count on. America has shifted with this change from what is possible to how to deal with the latest regulation or tax. An administration of fear.
Good luck getting the PTB and major media to listen to you, Paul. It’s an uphill fight against entrenched interests, as I’m sure you know. Get Drudge to run it, as well as the WSJ, and every other media outlet you can think of.
Environmental justice, like social justice, is a touchstone of the Marxists. Too bad people are waking up to it. I see the end of the EPA within two years—it will be gutted like a fish, and all the eugenicists/AGWers/enviro-facists removed and publicly shamed.
There’s nothing as blind as an AGW zealot when it comes to anything that might cast their mission in less than bright light.
The carbon guilt of rich westerners can only lead to greater misery for the greater mass of humanity that has no future without low cost energy.
I did not see any quantitative analysis in this essay. Here are some more interesting links:
A pro and con exchange:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/18738/cap_and_trades_economic_impact.html#
The CBO study:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/105xx/doc10564/05-05-CapAndTrade_Brief.pdf
Liberal Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=all
James Hansen is against C&T:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/opinion/07hansen.html
I first came across the whole AGW thing probably mid ’80s.
I dismissed it & never thought about it again until maybe 5 years ago.
I saw policies being enacted & thought, “WTF? Are they trying to kill off the poor?” I then started to investigate the reasons & discovered I was wrong not to react & become activist against AGW when I first came across it.
I’m sorry, I really didn’t think anyone would take it seriously!
DaveE.
It is their last chance….and the last summer time……a short summer. Help us Gaia!
See the many videos about Cap & Trade and the carbon lies of the AGW brigade at the website http://fraudulentclimate.atspace.com/ where the agenda of the eugenicists is exposed. Al gore is exposed as a buffoon and a charlatan. Additional videos wil be added each week. See Jim Inhofe’s devastating floor speech on this subject.
Mike says:
July 31, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I did not see any quantitative analysis in this essay. Here are some more interesting links:
============================================================
Gee, thanks Mike.
You’ve got to love Hansens’s plan. Tax dirty fuel to drive prices up, give people back some of that money to help them pay more until dirty fuel is pushed out of business…
as soon as dirty fuel is put out of business there will be no more tax money coming in to give people back…..
……leaving everyone to pay for green fuel at inflated subsidized prices
Where does the government get the money to subsidize? right now they are borrowing it.
trbixler says:
July 31, 2010 at 4:37 pm
…. America has shifted with this change from what is possible to how to deal with the latest regulation or tax. An administration of fear.
________________________________________________________-
Truer words were never spoken.
I am a small business owner and only a few minutes ago I was trying to decide whether or not to buy another piece of equipment or not and decided not to because I fear the US government is going to put me out of business next year.
A Walter Jefferies post Don’t Kill Your Dreams back in 2006 shows many Americans now view their government as “the enemy” and a change in people in 2008 has done nothing but make it worse.
Here is the real Grass Roots reaction to more regulation:
“I’ve heard a number of people say that “rather than comply they will kill or sell all their animals.” Might I suggest not saying that. It just plays right into the hands of Govi-Corp.
The large producers want that last 15% of the market. They resent that you raise your own food. By being independenet, by producing your own food, you steal pennies from the rich man’s pocket. Thief!
The government resents you because by raising your own meat you are cheating them out of taxes on the food and you are cheating them out of the taxes that they would get from the employment rolls from producers and vendors. It isn’t like its your money after all!…. “
There are 2.1 million families in the USA engaged in growing food, this does not include those running “under the radar” Congressman Markey of Cap and Trade fame wants to regulate them out of business too with his “food safety bill” HR 2749.
Between the huge government debt, the red tape of the “food safety bill” outlawing home grown food and the “Cap and Trade” bill killing our industry, it seems we have a government intent on bring our country down to third world status, killing its people and leaving it ripe for takeover by industrializing China who need our land.
For a bit of humor on the “under the radar farms” read Roosters and chickens and pigs in urban L.A., oh my!
@ur momisugly latitude
I do not agree with Hansen.
Is anyone really surprised by this? In May 2008 Obama made his position very clear when he said:
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
What that means is that we will no longer be allowed to work hard and provide well for ourselves. Instead, we will be expected to work hard and provide for others, in other nations. Obama intends to put an end to the American Dream.
We cannot take this lying down. Speak with your vote in November. Then speak again in 2012.
Unwed teen mothers and high school dropouts are a threat to minorities in America?
A threat?
As in, they threaten the existence of minorities?
Possibly your rhetoric got away from you on this one. To my ear it sounds as over-the-top as the malthusian fantasies of the pro-agw alarmists.
It is all about killing aspiration, you must not aspire, you must become the benign tax paying masses! Now who would want that?
We have created diseases in the form of depression. Now we have discovered anti depressants to make money on disease. Most people can’t define mourning and melancholia. If mourning is called melancholia and then called depression, we have become the Prozac nation. If Docs can stand between you and happiness with a prescription, there is money to be made from fear, sadness and several anxiety disorders. Parents used to build kids with character. Now they work hard to make kids happy.
In the greenie movement, there is a lot of misguided action in the direction of creating happiness, Eutopia and pleasure for everyone.
It will never happen.
If we were all driving electric cars and living in energy star homes, we would have more depression than ever.
Is Algore happy? Is James Hansen happy? Is Joe Romm happy?
Would they be happy if you were suffering?
How would you describe the legacy sex poodle alGore is leaving for his grandkids?
……leaving everyone to pay for green fuel at inflated subsidized prices
Where does the government get the money to subsidize? right now they are borrowing it.
I couldn’t agree more:)
Paul Driessen, well said, sir!
An excellent essay in language that is easy for anyone with a basic education to understand.
The only thing I would like to see added is a challenge. For Lisa Jackson, and others who want to Tax and Cap, to show by positive personal example how it is possible to get from Washington to the West Coast, in a timely manner, using transport with a zero carbon footprint. I mean an actual zero carbon footprint, not using offsets or carbon credits or other cheats. But to do it for REAL. By themselves. With witnesses.
regards
john
Brego says:
July 31, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Is anyone really surprised by this? In May 2008 Obama made his position very clear when he said:
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
I wonder what the thermostat at his house is set at?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/25545/
We don’t even need Cap and Trade to give green energy just remove fossil fuel subsidies. Market distortions and resource overuse (e.g. “tragedy of the commons”) are bad things.
But, no. Instead of *removing* a market distortion leading to overuse, the invent and entirely new distortion and a create an intangible asset market just like CDO’s.
What could *possibly* go wrong with that?
I’d be wary of associations with CORE: From Wiki – – –
CORE since 1968
Since 1968, CORE has been led by National Chairman Roy Innis, who initially led the organization to strongly support Black Nationalism. Subsequent political developments within the organization led it turn more towards the right. CORE supported the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. An article in Mother Jones magazine said of the modern organization that it “is better known among real civil rights groups for renting out its historic name to any corporation in need of a black front person. The group has taken money from the payday-lending industry, chemical giant (and original DDT manufacturer) Monsanto, and ExxonMobil.”[8] In his book, Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, Donald Gutstein wrote that “In recent years CORE used its African-American facade to work with conservative groups to attack organizations like Greenpeace and undermine environmental regulation. It’s fair to say that CORE was for sale to anyone with a need for visible black cheerleaders in its campaign.”[9]
Recently, on same sex marriage and black health in the U.S.: “When you say to society at large that you have to accept, not only accept our lifestyle, but promote it and put it on the same plane and equate it with traditional marriage, that’s where we draw the line and we say ‘no.’ That’s not something that is a civil right. That is not something that is a human right,” said Niger Innis, national spokesman for CORE, and son of Roy Innis.[10] COREcares, an HIV/AIDS advocacy, education and prevention program for black women, was dismantled due to pressure from Project 21. Innis is on the board of the conservative Project 21 organization.
According to an interview given by James Farmer in 1993, “CORE has no functioning chapters; it holds no conventions, no elections, no meetings, sets no policies, has no social programs and does no fund-raising. In my opinion, CORE is fraudulent.” [11]
[edit] CORE in Africa
During the 1970s, CORE supported Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin, who was awarded a life membership. [11]
CORE has an African branch based in Uganda, with Fiona Kobusingye as is its director.[12] Bringing attention to the malaria crisis is one of the organization’s main activities, and it has championed the use of DDT to fight the disease, and it has partnered with a variety of conservative and libertarian think tanks in this effort.[9] In 2007, CORE organized a 300-mile walk across Uganda to promote DDT-based interventions against malaria.[13] CORE paid university students to participate in the walk, and then left them in Kampala at the walk’s conclusion without means of returning home. “We feel used, dumped and taught to lie,” said one student. CORE staff said the students were exaggerating.[14]
————————————–
Although I agree with Mr. Driessen’s central concepts, alas this is a case where the “message is the media” in some respects.
Although I guess “truth in advertising”, it is better to be up front about that connection. One can be a “senior advisor” and still not be directly affected or have pronounced direct effect on an organization one advises. Please note the odd relationship between the inherently politically “left of the left” Oppenhiemer and the Manhattan project, which he essentially “headed up”. He was pivitol in the success of the project, yet spent years dissassociating himself from the work after the war! Go figure.
@ur momisugly Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
July 31, 2010 at 6:51 pm
……………………………
I wonder what the thermostat at his house is set at?
It’s not HIS house. It’s OUR house. He’s just living in it rent free for a couple more years.
We have seen several social justice movements over the last century: the Temprance movement to outlaw alcohol; bussing to improve black students’ educational opportunities; affirmative action to provide job opportunities to black job seekers; medicaid to provide health insurance for low income people; and now climate change proposed legislation is to protect future generations from catastrophic consequences of increased global temperatures. Well, how did we do? Temperance has been repealed having been the principle facilitator for the Americanization of organized crime. Bussing resulted in the disintegration of clustered communities, white flight, and an urban scene dominated by dysfunctional black politics, poverty, educational failure, and as now seen in Detroit, the downsizing of a city, bulldozing entire city blocks to mitigate urban blight. Affirmative action has lifted many into the middle class without the concomittant experiences necessary for those so lift to remain middle class. Medicaid has been co-opted by the middle class to pay for nursing home care for their aging parents, little is spent on women and children’s health. And now, in the name of “getting us off foreign oil” a series of taxes are proposed which will have the immediate effect of raising individual home energy costs by $1700 per year. Social engineering whether off shore as Marxist North Korea, Albania, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the old Soviet Union, or China have borne mixed results to say the least. Our track record here in USA has not been any better. Transition and adaptation are certainly better ways in my mind. No need to invoke alarmism or promote polarization of our population. “Just give me the facts, just the facts” and Dragnet’s Sargent Friday could go from there; and so can I.