Yesterday, president Obama announced emission standards which he said would raise the cost of automobiles by $1300.
While the new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil, they are expected to cost consumers an extra 1,300 US dollars per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Mr Obama said the fuel cost savings would offset the higher price of vehicles in three years.
His remarkable comment caught my attention, because one of the primary purposes of Obama’s “cap and trade” plan is to massively raise the cost of fuel. There aren’t going to be any fuel cost savings. In fact, Mr. Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle last year that he actually intends to bankrupt coal fired power plants using cap and trade:
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
Two automobile companies are already going bankrupt, so I think we should take Mr. Obama’s words seriously.
I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, not any of your taxes.
WASHINGTON – Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday that if elected he will push to increase the amount of income that is taxed to provide monthly Social Security benefits.
Audacity indeed. The assumption seems to be that no one remembers what was said last week.
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A word about communism and fascism, labels haphazardly tossed about to much rolling of eyes.
They’re both forms of socialism. Both systems interfere with the free market, and engender all the inefficiency that implies.
Communism has the government owning and controlling the means of production (think factories, but it’s just about everything). The Soviet Union and Red China imposed communism on what were third world economies, so they were able to force rapid industrialization without serious opposition (other than the 120 million people they killed).
Germany and Italy were already industrialized, so while Fascism would have liked to own things, it had to accept private ownership, and settled for only controlling industry. Big business, which really and truly doesn’t like competition, benefited with sweetheart government partnerships. Little enterprises suffer, as you might expect.
Fascism and communism hated each other, as brothers sometimes do, due to some notable differences. Communism has an internationalist bent, looking to export its philosophy. Fascism was nationalistic. Hitler maintained that National Socialism was “only for Germany.”
Communists insisted on the soviet, the peoples’ committees, to run things. Fascism subscribed instead to a “Führerprinzip,” the Leader Principle, where a charismatic, true believer would lead the nation.
.
When I look at the auto companies, banks, health care, and energy being nationalized by a true-believing, charismatic leader, it’s hard to avoid the comparison.
Global warming seems to be just another excuse for government control. We at WUWT have facts at our disposal, but so much of the public has only the true-believing MSM to go by.
The cap n trade bill sets up a phony market to trade air. It brings all of the dangers and corruption inherent with capitalism, but none of the productivity or benefit. They pretty much take our money, let the polluters off of the hook(for an appropriate campaign contribution), and the whole thing enriches a select few politicians, traders and other carefully selected beautiful people. It will do virtually nothing positive for the environment, but it will benefit the people that cripple our economy.
As far as peak oil, it is true, we are approaching peak oil. The greens are putting off limits the vast majority of our domestic resources even as we find more and more. I think we lost another 12 or 20 million acres of prime oil fields to ‘preservation’ since The One took office. There is also this little problem called abiotic oil. The peak is real, but artificially induced.
As the govt makes the dollar worthless and at the same time strangles domestic oil production, our worthless hyper-inflationary dollars will buy less and less oil. It will be the days of $4.25 gas, but with a 1 or 2 in front of the 4.
His tax pledge is worthless too, my cig taxes went up 18 days into his presidency. It was particularly targeted at the very poorest of smokers, the RYO guys, who’s can of Tops went from $13 to $38 overnight. He didn’t just break his tax pledge, he did it ultra-regressive by attacking the very poorest people first, 18 days into his first term.
Capitalism and the free market works well until manipulated. In the sub-prime case the govt is doing the manipulation with the CRA, enabling them to bundle the bad notes that they forced on lenders via ACORN et al, and worst of all, picking up the bad decision makers in the end with billions of borrowed dollars.
What The One is forcing on us will be painful for a while, but hopefully it will be worth it. People like the wide eyed child in the video have been brainwashed with the eco-socialist garbage throughout their academic lives, and for years on the telescreen. We will never educate those kids to the reality unless they suffer for it. As Radical Dan always used to say, stupidity should be painful.
This is going to hurt pretty bad.
Steve Goddard (11:06:30) : 20 billion…
And what could the 805 billion housing bailout (none of which ended up going to the toxic loans) have done if divided up among all in-trouble home owners instead of given, without oversight, to banks?
So where is all this money really going?
Steven Goddard (14:51:00) :
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
Wonderful news for the elderly on fixed incomes. Very compassionate.
But then again, Pres. Obama said he will only raise taxes on the rich. So nothing to see here.
Jerry Lee Davis (14:30:13)
Minor correction: 50% of the population has above –median– intelligence.
A word about communism and fascism, labels haphazardly tossed about to much moaning and rolling of eyes.
They’re both forms of socialism. Both systems interfere with the free market, and engender all the inefficiency that implies.
Communism has the government owning and controlling the means of production (think factories, but it’s just about everything). The Soviet Union and Red China imposed communism on third world economies, so they were able to force rapid industrialization without serious opposition (other than the 120 million people they killed).
Germany and Italy were already industrialized, so while Fascism would have liked to own things, it had to accept private ownership, and settled for only controlling industry. Big business, which really and truly doesn’t like competition, benefited with sweetheart government partnership. The little enterprises suffer, as you might expect.
Fascism and communism hated each other, as brothers sometimes do, due to some notable differences. Communism has an internationalist bent, looking to export its philosophy. Fascism was nationalistic. Hitler maintained that National Socialism was “only for Germany.”
Communists insisted on the soviet, the peoples’ committees, to run things. Fascism subscribed instead to a “Führerprinzip,” the Leader Principle, where a charismatic, true believer would lead the nation.
.
When I look at the auto companies, banks, health care, and energy being nationalized by a true-believing, charismatic leader, it’s hard to avoid the comparison, ass much as we’d wish to.
Global warming seems to be yet another excuse for government control. We at WUWT have facts at our disposal, but so much of the public has only the true-believing MSM to go by.
http://greenhellblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/cafe-obama-proposed-mileage-standards-would-kill-more-americans-than-iraq-war/
Smokey
Roads (12:17:15), just about everything you said is incorrect.
US automakers didn’t fail because of what they produced. The Toyota NUUMI plant in California is doing fine. It is non-union. The BMW plant in S. Carolina is also doing fine. Neither are in any danger of bankruptcy.
Smokey: Toyota and BMW aren’t going bust, and that’s my point. Both aren’t American companies. They are globally competitive international companies which make fuel-efficient cars that are saleable all around the world.
GM and Chrysler concentrated on the home market, which was less regulated and less sensitive to fuel consumption under low oil price conditions but proved uncompetitive and almost unsaleable in the high oil price world.
In this regard, it’s apparent that six months of high gasoline prices achieved more in changing mindsets on gas guzzlers than three decades of government regulations. Looking ahead to a world of higher oil prices ahead, the sales of fuel-inefficient vehicles are certain to fall still further.
This seems like a good time to remind WUWT readers of an upcoming seminar and webcast, found at
http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/seminars/krosnick/krosnick.htm
The title is “What Americans Really Think About Climate Change. ”
This will be on May 26 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.
Of course, if you are saving roughly $650 per year in gasoline (gas at $3/gallon) – then you pay off the difference in two years and everything after that is savings for you – plus less consumption for the environment and less dependence on foreign oil.
All in all – not a bad idea.
Smokey (14:24:36) :
“The U.S. is heading toward the same place that the formerly Great Britain is already at:”
Smokey, we lead the world in bad governments. I can’t see how you can possibly catch up with us.
Tonyb
Its easy to see why politicians are falling over each other to “cap & trade”.
Every year you get to sell “virtual” paper and get a big up front injection of very real tax money with an absolute minimum paperwork involved.
As there is no “anchor” for the tax – you get to set it at any level that will raise whatever you need for for your current plans.
(Linking it to some kind of reality as per the “T3 tax (Ross Mckitrick) just doesn’t have the “wiggle room” required.)
As a bonus you have a constant stream of well funded lobbyists kicking down your door.
Suppose you issue $200 billion in CC’s this year. By mid year their spot value is 350. That means that someone out there is sat on $350 Billion that could be worth significantly more or less depending on the size of the next issue. A real recipe for corruption if ever one was devised.
The size of the issue is just pulled out of thin air (sorry), you can always find some “evidence” to justify the issue. You can also be sure that however the science turns out such a system will be impossible to dismantle.
Watch how fast the Environmental lobby turn once they realise what has been created in their name.
Imagine that you had approached a bunch of politicians a couple of decades ago suggesting that you had devised a sure fire plan that would tax the air people breathe and they would not only accept the tax but thank you for it complaining only that it is too low. They would certainly have to release you from the asylum now.
A few years ago my Niece (6 at the time) didn’t want to go to London with her father. We were a bit puzzled by her reaction until she informed us that she wasn’t a very good swimmer. She produced her school “global warming” project, sure enough London was under water and next to the picture was a “gold star” and the teacher comment – “very good”.
The T shirts are on order 🙂
smokey 12:11:16
7 – 8 trillion is ten times 700 billion, not a thousand times.
Still way, way too much, though.
John Egan,
Please help me with the mathematics:
The government is going to force auto prices up, and make fossil fuel prices “skyrocket,” simultaneously. I’m curious how you can add two large positive, non-zero numbers together and come up with a sum of zero, so that consumers are not affected.
Is this the new Obama-maths?
@Peter Barnes,
What it means is because of the law of supply and demand, carbon trading will not result in a gram of co2 saved. Even if nuclear is built then the carbon credit, would just be used elseware, to release carbon.The overall effect could be to increase co2?
This is true if the “cap” on carbon emissions never changes, and can be enforced. The thing that you may not have considered is that the cap is intended to be lowered over time, X gigatons this year, 0.9X gigatons in a decade, etc. The press announcements indicate that 2005 is being used as a baseline, with emissions in 2050 expected to be something like 82% lower than in 2005. The cost to emit a ton of carbon in 2050 should therefore be about 5x higher (1/5 of the carbon permits available) than it is if this law is adopted.
Some of this is possible, few of us use electricity-consuming or fuel-burning implements of the type that were on the market in 1954, so replacement of those things over time with more efficient models can lower electricity demand and with it, CO2 emissions. We’ve seen much growth in population and GDP since 1954, along with a much cleaner environment as some emissions have been regulated. When is the last time you heard anyone talking about acid rain?
I see a couple of problems with this. First, in any endeavor, getting the first 50% of efficency improvement over baseline is usually easy, and can even be cheap. Once the obvious and cheap things have been done, incremental progress gets not only harder, but often quite a bit more expensive, and improving energy efficiency to the point where anything we have that uses electricity or burns fuel is 5x more efficient than it is now is going to be quite expensive indeed. The simple question then becomes: why do you need a dishwasher? Why do you need a gas grill, you have a stove, don’t you? If you don’t use that hot water heater becomes infinitely efficient, doesn’t it?
Secondly, and related to my first point, this entire exercise, besides being built on what I believe are some false assumptions, is little more than environmentalists trying desperately to gain control of more, having succeded already beyond their wildest dreams. Particulate and SOx and NOx emissions, the bane of environmentalists of the 1970s, are down remarkably. Our water is cleaner, and our economy as a whole much more energy-efficient than in previous generations. The “easy” bits have been done. Now the job of the environmentalist is much harder, in part because of their success.
Thus the pollutant that needs controlling is carbon dioxide, something measured in the parts per million. For water, it’s pthalates and the remains of OCPs in our sewer systems, measured in parts per billion, or the flap over arsenic regulation in the early days of the Bush Administration. The need to control has driven them to ever-smaller targets, ever more esoteric things that absolutely require confiscatory taxes and oppressive regulation to fix. It’s policy formation on the homeopathic principle: the less of it there is, the more powerful it has to be.
It’s a sickness. Without computer modeling and temperature records of somewhat questionable provenance and, recently, dubious behavior, there would be absolutely no public outcry to bottle the genie that is CO2, outside of the soft-drink industry, which actually needs CO2 for bottling. Grasping at straws, except this straw has a nifty animation showing that we’re all going to die when the climate falls apart. No, don’t ask about our methodology, we’re right and you’re wrong. They don’t like coal, and now that it’s clean of almost everything except CO2, then CO2 is the new target.
And don’t expect anything like a multidecadal cooling trend in the future to make them back off their intent, or their methods. Like a well-meaning bystander who just rescued you from a garden hose, they will dangle it in front of your eyes and tell you how lucky you were that they killed that snake right before you stepped on it. If the current cooling trend continues, it will be evidence that the CO2 cap and trade scheme works, even before it’s implemented.
Maybe they’ll get it when the glaciers reclaim Chicago and crush the last abode of The One before his ascension to the White House. I think it’s more likely that they’ll tell you how much worse the climate change would have been if they hadn’t intervened.
rtw,
You’re right, thanks for the correction. I was thinking a billion compared to a trillion.
1. None of the comments dealing with the current rise in crude oil prices mention that one of the factors driving the increase is the steadily devaluing dollar. Nearly everything in Obama’s plans is hastening the depreciation of the dollar by design.
2. An easy way to describe cap and trade is that it is analogous to a national value added tax. The tax is levied on energy production and consumption and increases the cost of all manufacturing, distribution, provision of services and transportation. The tax at every level is ultimately passed on to consumers. Every state that adopts the system, exacerbates the outcome by operating as a tax upon a tax.
I prefer the label given to cap and trade in most of the rest of the world, an emissions trading scheme. Scheme is a descriptive term that connotes impropriety or more nefarious conduct.
I propose that everyone participating in WUWT hereafter use emissions trading scheme exclusively.
Anthony you might want to censor me for being politically incorrect but I’m going to say this anyway. If you want to delete it then so be it.
In my opinion the TARP bill was clear proof that our government is run by criminals. Taking $700 billion from the taxpayers and giving it to the crooked bankers who caused our current financial fiasco is not only unconstitutional but it also amounts to the biggest theft in history.
Carbon taxes and cap and trade schemes just add more proof.
Reply: Like there’s any way to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this thread ~ charles the sometimes pc moderator
“Is this the new Obama-maths?”
No, It’s voodoo obamanomics.
2) we’ll all be better off without being dependant on fossil fuels.
Without an economical replacement we will all be beholden to premature death.
African Penguin Numbers in Sharp Decline.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090520/sc_afp/safricaenvironmentpenguins
The cluprit you ask – why GW of course!
A closer look though:
The African Penguin, also known as a jackass penguin because of its donkey-like bray, is the only species of the charismatic animal which breeds in Africa and is found only around southern Africa.
There’s your answer, jackass penguins. A species obviously headed for extinstion.
The Boy of John
GW (09:37:10) :
Seeing this coming for about a year now, last fall I purchased two 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokees with the big 5.9 litre engines.
We bought an SUV late last year as well. After you install two car seats in a sedan, all you’re left with is a two-seater. I’m not sure if two would even fit in a Prius.
Pre-cap & trade, the average American family has 2.2 kids and a dog; post-cap & trade, that will dwindle to an adopted midget & a gecko. The indirect consequences are endless.
wow. after scrolling through it appears that most of the poster here and Mr. Watts that the uproar here is based on ignorance of the policy and economics behind it.
First and foremost, to the point connecting gasoline prices and the cap and trade mechanism, the proposed mechanism will only regulate large power producers (read: coal fired power plants). Fuel prices may increase marginally due to increased prices in electricity. but only insofar as it requires electricity to run a refinery.
Second the whole point of such a mechanism is to internalize the costs of energy use which are not currently included in the price. This will necessarily increase the prices of electricity, but the intention is to incentivize consumer choices and market innovation to come up with less carbon-intesive ways to make electricity. The fact that prices get pushed to consumers provides a mechanism for consumers (and the people that make things they buy) to look for more energy efficient products. This is also a mechanism that makes renewables more competative with conventional power, which will increase the the competition to make renewables, which will drive down the price of renewables.
Now, taking this into account, the cap and trade is designed to be a mechanism for the market to find the most efficent ways to reduce GHG emissions (via the trade the trade aspect). Taxes do not do this, so technically, cap and trade is not a tax.
Do you know how long it takes to find someone in the scientific community who actually tries to rely on factual information. Thanks for the article. Keep up the good work.
FWIW, I was comparing a chart of the GWO (fund that tracks stocks in a Global Warming Index) and decided to compare it to oil (via Exxon as a proxy…)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/the-market-votes-no-on-global-warming/
It’s pretty clear that folks are voting with the dollars (and feet) against the AGW party line. Given the spectacular refusal of ultra liberal spend it all NOW California to turn down added taxes in this last election, Cap & Tax looks like it’s about to hit a wall.