Guest post by Steven Goddard
The Senate Budget Committee chairman said today :
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said he has spoken to enough colleagues about several different provisions in the budget to make him think Congress won’t pass it. Conrad urged White House budget director Peter Orszag not to “draw lines in the sand” with lawmakers, most notably on Obama’s plan for a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions. “Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something,”
So who is Senator Conrad referring to with that last comment?
Orszag acknowledged concerns over the budget and added that the budget plan represents the administration’s “best judgments.“
I wonder if the people in Michigan fighting to keep ice from destroying their houses, are willing to pay extra taxes to fight global warming?
“Despite the Obama administration’s claim that its budget wouldn’t raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year, ‘the budget before us assumes large amounts of money’ from the climate-change legislation, Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said at a hearing Tuesday. ‘And that means higher prices for Americans for food, for gas, for electricity, and in a state like Michigan for home heating – pretty much anything that they buy.'”
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
– Candidate Obama in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle January 17, 2008
I wonder if any of that huge sum might get passed on to people making less than $250,000? What do readers think?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
From the very first post:
P Folkens:
Obama stated very clearly during the campaign that he would eliminate earmarks from the budget.
There are over 6,000 earmarks in this proposed new budget, and Obama’s promise appears to be worthless. It used to be that a man’s word was his bond. Mr. Obama believes he is exempt from that gauge of character.
Regulations are a silent tax increase. At my job, at least until I got it stuck on someone else, I was responsible for keeping track of a certain type of air pollution our building generated. The pollution is a cause of smog and it is probably in the States interest to keep track of emission sources. but it does add cost. Each person using the polluting product had to write down his use, and once a month I had to total up the amounts, make up a new tally sheet, post it and forward the results to the facility air pollution manager who compiled the complete report for the State. Someone at the State level also went through all this for all the companies and other sources in the state compiled his report which was then forwarded to the Federal Government.
At each of these levels someone is getting paid to do this work, and the bill is paid by taxpayers, consumers, or investors. For each new regulation this chain of spending is instituted and even if the Feds reimbursed the States the costs and the States the companies in the end taxpayers (consumers) would still be covering the bill. At my level the costs are not huge probably around $70,000 a year for all the facility personnel reporting and compiling data and the resultant overhead charges. but that is just for one source of pollution at one facility, multiply that by all the national facilities for all the various pollution sources and it is a lot of money, even with nothing spent on actually reducing the amount of pollution.
Alan the Brit: Charlie Jug-Ears should stick to muttering sweet nothings to his sweetpeas. It’s what he does best after all. And it’s not just the GCSE physics paper that is politically correct and dumbed down to the point of imbecility. You want to take a gander at the biology and chemisty ones too. For science papers they are singularly lacking in anything approaching science. It’s nothing short of mental grooming. If it had been cold war Russia doing this it would have been called brainwashing.
Alex wrote: “To be honest, while Obama does seem a little hung up on the whole global warming thing, he is such an improvement from his predecessor and when you think that we could have had Palin in the white-house”
FYI, the Vice President lives at the United States Naval Observatory, not the White House.
I love that cartoon!
Stay in bed and sell carbon credits.
There is a down side to staying in bed.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bedbugs-return-to-british-hotels-1640159.html
Yes BED BUGS!!!!!!
Why are they reappearing and in such numbers?
You guessed it CO2.
“Bedbugs are attracted by exhaled CO2 and body heat, not by dirt. And they feed on blood, not waste.”
Oh non, exhaled CO2 there goes my carbon credits business.
And it is not just a UK problem:
http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/wednesday/health/ny-libugs116065065mar11,0,7884729.story
So why are we being invaded by the Bed Bug?
Well about six years ago I read an article about low temperature washing powders. These powders appeared too good to be true, there had to be a catch. My suspicious nature.
We were encouraged to switch to save money and more importantly save the planet. Meanwhile we were also being told that using low temperature washes will give us Clean Bed Bugs. The little blighters just love 30C and they come out of the wash sparkling clean and ready for the night a head or foot or hand or…
So far I have not seen advice telling people to wash bedding at +60C, I guess it is better to blame CO2 and spend a fortune of low temperature washing powder.
I see the Cap & Trade as another bubble boondoggle. The economic sharks will have another feeding frenzy as wealth is transferred about, and when the bubble pops the nations stupid enough to let this ravenous feeder out of the cage will suffer the consequences. The bubble will most likely burst as a lazy Sun fails to get it’s Solar Cycle in gear and the crops that were mismanaged fail. Along with the economic panic will come outrageous prices for food & fuel. The failure of renewable energy sources will be telling as there isn’t an output from the Sun to sustain them as a permanent replacement for abundant fossil fuels even in good times, let alone a massive Grand Minimum. The failure also to keep up with power plants will be salt rubbed in the wounds.
Oops. Cap & Trade looks good only on paper.
Carbon Default Swaps.
Green Toxic Assets.
Didn’t learn anything from this last round of bubblegum, did they?
Apparently not.
How much renewables can you expect from a comatose Sun 20 year hence?
[snip – this is way OT, let us stick to climate cap and trade please – Anthony]
More ad hominem attacks and disinformation by the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/mar/10/climate-change-denier
They’re now coming up to about six alarmist articles a day in their attempt to divide and conquer society. For all their work in creating social strife between people, they claim to be ethical.
[snip – this is way OT, let us stick to climate and carbon cap and trade please – Anthony]
Politicians are generally not stupid and will play the game of looking like they are doing something while doing nothing. If they can raise extra revenue along the way through an emissions trading scheme they will readily do that. They are more interested in symbolism like wind farms so that green voters (mostly in urban areas) will they are wonderful for mitigating global warming. In Australia where 95% of our electricity is produced by coal and will continue to be because of reluctance to adopt nuclear power for baseload rural residents in places like beautiful Macedon Ranges will have inflicted on them thousands of near useless turbines to satisfy green voters. Meanwhile not one coal fired power station will close.
PS Macedon Ranges is one the most bushfire prone regions in the world and turbines have been known to cause fires HYdro Tasmania and the Victorian?Australian Government do not care as longa sthey look like they are doing something and can get the urban vote to keep them power.
For those of you in the “At least Obama’s better than Bush” camp, give the man time.
He’s only been in office a few months and he’s racked up a pretty impressive list of failures already.
He knew in November that he would be coming into office in a recession, yet he nominated a man, (Geithner), as Treasury Secretary who can’t even get his tax returns right, even using TurboTax, and the list of unfilled positions at Treasury is frightening.
He talks about taking politics out of science then appoints the likes of Chu, Holdren and Browner to positions that will have enormous impacts on scientific and technical development in the US.
Not to mention the diplomatic faux pas with the Brits and Russians.
I predict that a lot of US, (and world), citizens will be pining for the good old days of Dubya in a few years time.
“It’s clear most people are stupid (Although I do believe Obama will prove to be a big improvement on Bush).”
Oh, the irony!
Advisory scientists must be elected by the people, not appointed by the administration.
Cap and trade? Don’t know what, if anything, it’ll do for the environment, but for the economy it’ll be more like scrap and fade.
Alex wrote: “To be honest, while Obama does seem a little hung up on the whole global warming thing, he is such an improvement from his predecessor and when you think that we could have had Palin in the white-house”
Huh? McCain/Palin would have been 1000 times better than Obama! At least my government wouldn’t be squandering my kid’s future earnings away on global warming boondogles…
Slightly off topic, but a colleague of mine came up with the following after particulalry drunken discussion in a Tokyo bar:
http://calorieoffsetting.com/
I feel quite smug. I believe in pre-soak, hot water and a non-bio powder (Fairy). No rashes. No bug bites. No stains.
Charlie Jug-Ears might think that environment comes before poverty (probably received that pearl of wisdom from one of his geraniums or maybe a pansy). I prefer to believe that cleanliness comes before stupidity.
To be honest, Charlie is considered a bit of a joke by many Brits so perhaps he’s doing us a favour tooting his bugle for the other side. I mean, his apocalypse within 100 months was met with derision by all except the warmists, the eco-sheep, the government and the BBC. In a recent poll the environment issue came a poor last in importance for the UK electorate who perceive AGW alarmism and “green” policies as a cynical instrument of taxation and control.
At least you guys aren’t alone in your cynisism. Keep up the good work.
A little OT but you simply have to see this classic slice of Moonbatism – if you haven’t already that is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/06/climate-change-deniers-top-10
No you haven’t missed anything. But the President announcing that income taxes are to go up in order to cover the gambling debts of our financial institutions just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Artificiality capping CO2 (in effect all energy) will have but one outcome – an artificial rise in energy prices followed by an equally artificial rise in the price of most everything else. (Or an ‘everything tax’ as we call it)
I had just noticed that a Nazi children’s book ‘Der Giftpilz/The Poisonous Mushroom’ used the same propaganda against Jews that the Greens and Alarmists now use against their opponents.
One chapter in the book was called How To Identify A Jew. The Guardian has had four articles in the last week including one today – How To Identify A Denier.
The chapter of Der Giftpilz in question also labels all Jews as criminals, which is also a word used by Alarmists to describe energy producers and opponents.
WUWT it is a SABBATH of deniers, kind of Witches of Salem congregation, they should be sent to the stake! (Al the Magnificent, Superior of the sacred order of the Green Inquisition)
Alex Llewelyn,
From the Vice-Presidential debate. Looks to me like Palin gave a very sensible answer and Biden was clueless and inarticulate. She was hammered by the MSM for telling the truth, and Biden received high praise for perpetuating nonsense.
IFILL: Governor, I’m happy to talk to you in this next section about energy issues. Let’s talk about climate change. What is true and what is false about what we have heard, read, discussed, debated about the causes of climate change?
PALIN: Yes. Well, as the nation’s only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real.
I’m not one to attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.
But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?
We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.
As governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change sub-cabinet to start dealing with the impacts. We’ve got to reduce emissions. John McCain is right there with an “all of the above” approach to deal with climate change impacts.
We’ve got to become energy independent for that reason. Also as we rely more and more on other countries that don’t care as much about the climate as we do, we’re allowing them to produce and to emit and even pollute more than America would ever stand for. So even in dealing with climate change, it’s all the more reason that we have an “all of the above” approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.
IFILL: Senator, what is true and what is false about the causes?
BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. And, look, this probably explains the biggest fundamental difference between John McCain and Barack Obama and Sarah Palin and Joe Biden — Governor Palin and Joe Biden.
If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.
UK Sceptic (04:43:05) :
I feel quite smug. I believe in pre-soak, hot water and a non-bio powder (Fairy). No rashes. No bug bites. No stains.
Oh no you cannot be that smug, the BBC knows best “Because washing machines use CO2-intensive electricity to heat up cold water rather than gas”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bloom/actions/lowtempwashing.shtml#quickjump
Now if I understand this highly qualitative BBC science, Electricity is bad and Gas is good. I’m getting confused.
“According to the washing powder manufacturer Ariel, over the course of a year, washing at 30°C instead of 60°C saves enough CO2 to fill four million double-decker buses”.
I take it that this refers to 4 million double-decker buses at STP.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1606740530#/group.php?gid=31499535675
Above is a Facebook group created by Greens to disseminate the belief that vaccines are toxic and that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children.
The introduction says that they had attempted to ‘green’ vaccines but gave up trying because everything about them was toxic.
This is the same ideology behind the demonisation of CO2
This is a situation similar to tobacco, a substance which could be banned outright for many reasons, but is kept around for the tax revenue it generates. If AGW is a real problem then take all the revenue generated by emission reduction schemes and attack the problem directly.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of Buckingham Palace and its grounds is?