House to Vote on Climate Bill By Friday
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090622-716255.html
If you have not contacted your legislator yet, consider doing so after reading this. – Anthony
Left Pushback on Waxman-Markey: Is It Time to Start Over?
by Robert Bradley, Master Resource
June 23, 2009
The battle cry of Joseph Romm at Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) earlier this year was “Obama Can Get a Better Climate Bill in 2010: Here’s How.” But now Romm is in panic mode, trying to convince the rebelling Environmental Left that the out-of-control Waxman-Markey climate change bill (now 1,090 1,201 pages) is the last best hope to save civilization. As Romm stated in a post yesterday:
Waxman-Markey is the only game in town. If it fails, I see no chance whatsoever of stabilizing anywhere near 350 to 450 ppm since serious U.S. action would certainly be off the table for years, the effort to jumpstart the clean energy economy in this country would stall, the international negotiating process would fall apart, and any chance of a deal with China would be dead.
But given that Waxman-Markey is climatically inconsequential, a fact that Romm does not dispute ( “well, duh“, he said), the hard Left is understandably getting restless, even rebelling against the pseudo climate bill. After all, who really wants an Enronesque cap-and-trade bill that enriches lawyers and corporate types at the expense of everyone else? The first comment on Romm’s blog at Climate Progress made this point:
No. I’m sorry, but the first question everyone must ask about Waxman-Markey is “Did we really need more than 600 pages to do legislate what needs to be done and isn’t 600 pages of dense text likely to have hidden in it so many loopholes, exceptions, obscure procedures and contrary regulations and guidelines that no one except a high-powered corporate law firm will be able to make total sense of it (and thus be able to use it to their corporate clients benefit).”
For the same reason, to Romm’s chagrin, NASA scientist and Al Gore mentor James Hansen got off the Waxman-Markey bandwagon 553 pages ago. Hansen complained:
Governments are retreating to feckless “cap-and-trade”, a minor tweak to business-as-usual…. The 648-page cap-and-trade monstrosity that is being foisted on the U.S. Congress provides the answer. Not a single Congressperson has read it. They don’t need to – they just need to add more paragraphs to support their own special interests. By the way, the Congress people do not write most of those paragraphs—they are “suggested” by people in alligator shoes.
What Happened to Radical Romm?
Romm’s about-face from radical to incrementalist is noteworthy. Perhaps his superiors at the Center for American Progress put the heat on him. But whatever the reason (he will have to tell us later), Romm has committed himself to a watered-out Waxman-Markey and now finds himself on a slow boat to China.
“Has Joe Romm gone missing?” asked Roger Pielke Jr., the oft-target of take-no-prisoners Romm. Pielke begins:
I’ve come to depend upon Joe Romm for ideological rigidity and his unwavering faith in his own infallibility. Such commitment provides a useful touchstone in the climate debate. So I have been dismayed to see Romm not just abandon some of his most firmly held views, but sprint in the opposite direction while at the same time lambasting those who would have the gall to espouse views that he only recently held. Such relativism smacks of kowtowing to political expediency while ignoring policy outcomes or even something even more sinister, maybe even involving the . . . deniers.
Pielke wonders:
Perhaps the real Joe Romm has been kidnapped, and an offset-loving, climate-delayer-eq, fossil fuel drinking replacement has been quietly spirited into his place? A look at the recent flip-flopping by Joe Romm might help us understand the transformation, and with some luck, locate the real Joe Romm and return him to his proper place in the climate debate.
Pielke explained:
When a coalition of middle-of-the-road environmental groups and large businesses came out with the USCAP proposal for cap and trade, Joe Romm came out in his usual forceful way against their proposal (and especially its reliance on offsets):
“The U.S. Climate Action Partnership — a coalition of businesses and enviros once though to be important — have released their wimpy Blueprint for Legislative Action.
I can sort of understand why, say, Duke Energy, signed on to this, but NRDC and EDF and WRI have a lot of explaining to do. As we will see, this proposal would be wholly inadequate as a final piece of legislation. As a starting point it is unilateral disarmament to the conservative politicians and big fossil fuel companies who will be working hard to gut any bill. Kudos to the National Wildlife Federation for withdrawing from USCAP rather than signing on.”
Pielke notes the irony:
It turns out that the USCAP proposal “was the basis for the Waxman-Markey” bill, according to Romm. At some point Romm’s views changed, and not just by a little — his rhetoric on USCAP/Waxman-Markey has flip-flopped 180 degrees, going from labeling USCAP/Waxman-Markey as representing “unilateral disarmament to the conservative politicians and big fossil fuel companies” to a cryptic message explaining “How I learned to stop worrying and love Waxman-Markey.” Particularly odd is Romm coming out in strong defense of the potential use of domestic and international offsets to fulfill the bulk of the “emissions reduction” requirements of Waxman-Markey, given that Romm has been/was among the most vocal opponents of the use of offsets to represent “emissions reductions” — and rightly so in my view.. Has Romm joined the board of Duke Energy? What gives? Is he now a “denier-eq 1000″ (to speak in Romm-ese)?
A New Way Forward?
The inevitable politicization of climate policy–call it government failure–should lead well-meaning, open-minded environmentalists to check their premises and consider a nonpolitical approach to what they see as market failure. After all, the imperfect government must be weighted against the imperfect market. Perhaps a revolt against political capitalism, or what in this area is called the climate-industrial complex, will bring about the end of not only Waxman-Markey but the futile crusade to “stabilize climate.”
I think it’s important to keep the snowball from rolling off the hill. Time is on the side of the skeptics.
Yes, now is the time to let your representative have an ear full (their office staff will get the word to the good rep) and tell him or her you will remember in November.
The science doesn’t support it and it’s an insiders and corporate lawyer’s paradise.
Stop the madness.
Romm is a Soros employee who pretends to be a scientist yet is nothing but a leftist advocate. His words aren’t worth consideration outside of that context.
1201 pages. And Waxman hasn’t read the first rendition when it was under 950.
Lawyers charge by the page, by the hour and by contingency results.
Soros is trying to play the currency and commodities markets like enron did. First requirement is volatility.
This site makes it very easy to contact your Representative and Senators: click
Hasn’t Joe heard? China has said unequivocally “NO!” to the cap n’ trade scheme. The world’s biggest polluter has left the table. And the IPCC CO2 goals even if met result in a whopping reduction of 0.05ºC!! Doh!
http://masterresource.org/?p=2355
What our friend Henry Waxman and others need to get in their heads is this: Cap n’ Trade is a tax scheme to finance a Marxist utopia envisioned by the far left. It has little to do with its cover, “Climate Change.”
Letting this bill die does nothing to limit the goal of Energy Independence – which meets the real expectations of bipartisan left and right (conservation, jobs, national security, debt reduction, alternative energy, jobs, etc.) It resets the direction of national and international energy policy to Energy Independence and discards the falsified claim that CO2 is a “pollutant.”
Who loses? Only the elite globalists hoping to pillage the planet’s economies with their carbon dioxide tax. They are desperate because the people know the threat of “catastrophic climate events” is junk-science, BS! And that genie ain’t going back in the bottle.
The king is dead Joe. Long live the king.
Waxman-Markey or The Recreation of Enron Act; we all saw how that particular government incursion into the marketplace worked out.
Living in California both senators and my Congressional representative are for the Markey-Waxman Cap and Trade bill ingenuously called the American Clean Energy and Security Act… ugh… I hope more enlightened politicians in other states can help defeat this onerous piece of bovine excrement.
http://markey.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3743&Itemid=125
Sigh…Obama just made a statement on Waxman-Markey at a press conference. Bracketed is possibly paraphrased: “[…these incentives (for solar, wind, geothermal, conservervation) will be paid for by the polluters responsible for] the dangerous carbon emissions that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe.”
Waxman is an idiot. He doesn’t know the details of global warming because he said he relies on the scientists but he sure as hell know how his committee sliced and diced the bill to induce others to vote for it… arrgh!!
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05/my-markeywaxman-query-what-are-the-climate-benefits.html
Leon Brozyna (09:17:15) :
Waxman-Markey or The Recreation of Enron Act; we all saw how that particular government incursion into the marketplace worked out.
With the rather convenient and rather mysterious collapse of the building all the paper evidence being studied by the fraud investigators was housed in.
kmye (09:44:14) :
Sigh…Obama just made a statement on Waxman-Markey at a press conference. Bracketed is possibly paraphrased: “[…these incentives (for solar, wind, geothermal, conservervation) will be paid for by the polluters responsible for] the dangerous carbon emissions that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe.”
Oops, there goes coca cola and beer.
RE: Smokey (09:06:55) :
This site makes it very easy to contact your Representative and Senators: click
Thanks for the link, Smokey. I’ve written my reps.
“Sigh…Obama just made a statement on Waxman-Markey at a press conference. Bracketed is possibly paraphrased: “[…these incentives (for solar, wind, geothermal, conservervation) will be paid for by the polluters responsible for] the dangerous carbon emissions that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe.”
How uneducated. These will be figured in the costs and prices. The consuumer pays. Look at your phone bill. They itemize fees, charges and taxes. Cattle tax will raise meat prices.
If we have pets that exhale, they must also be fairly taxed. If you burn pasture for cattle, he says you deserve tax. See the EPA can’t raise taxes. They also can’t call something a polutant and discriminate.
I just finished watching our LEADER’S latest news conference.
He thanked several people that are helping with the Waxman-Markey bill
and noted the importance of stoping the carbon pollution that is currently
destroying our enviroment.
Sure is funny; the absurbity of it all, ignorance runs all the way up to the top man who also actually believes in this nonsense!
Personally, I hope we fall quickly into the big chill, Ice Age all the way!
Obama loves spouting rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake – while he revels in the moment, glimmering in his +8 armor with his “blade of justice” slicing off the head of “dangerous man-made global warming”, here on planet Earth, we see a very different Obama without any armor but dressed like bureaucrat advancing menacingly with his “pen of cap & trade” toward our unprotected economy…
His Waxman WILL leave a Markey… Ouch.
I submitted a message to my Senator, Evan Bayh, a Democrat. And almost immediate canned response parroting the Obama administration was forthcoming. My message took the form of suggesting that he ask Sen. Fielding’s questions before we commit trillions of dollars to Waxman-Markey. Within 20 minutes, I got a canned response talking about “unequivocal and complete consensus that global warming is real and is caused by humans”.
Yeah, I’m really hoping for a Dalton or even a Maunder Minimum now. It’s the only way to sink this pig of a bill…
One house of congress a law does not it make. Getting stupid stuff passed in The House of Reprehensibles is easy because there are Democrats running everywhere, it is like a plague of locusts, nearly every seat you look at has a smiling Dem beaming back at you.
The Senate is the key. Now if we can make sure some Dem Senators get some religion (the old time stuff on the economy) we still can stop the insanity. Watch for any hooks in the bill tying it to the Healthcare bill when the final draft is released. I think the Admin may try for a two-fer here.
So work on the Senators, Brutus would be a good place to start.
It seems the Speaker is trying to get it to a vote on Friday . Time to make those phone calls – it couldn’t hurt , even if your rep is either for it or on the fence . If they hear from enough voters , they might change their mind . They would like to keep their job .
Politics makes strange bedfellows, that’s for sure. I’ll take support from the left to help stop Waxmen-Markey, but don’t be fooled. The left is in opposition because Waxmen-Markey doesn’t go far enough.
Well, for once I actully agree with Hansen, though for completely different reasons.
I gave my congressman an earful several weeks ago, and I received a boilerplate about “climate change” without any indication that he or his staff had read my letter other than to determine the general subject. I shot off an angry letter to him about the obvious failure to read my letter which I did receive a letter back addressing my concerns in the first letter. However, it was obvious that neither he or his staff had really paid attention to anyone except the AGW crowd. Not only did he say how much the Waxman bill was going to do to help the environment he said in so many words that the Congressional Budget Office didn’t know what it was talking when the CBO said the bill would cost the average family upwards of three grand a year. My congressman said it would cost the average family “only” $120 a year.
Sometimes I think I could get better results talking to a deaf man, at least he would attempt to understand what I was saying.
It is no surprise that the “corporate heads of the AGW industry” are snarling at each other. These elitist fanatics have big egos- see folk hero Hansen smiling among the ragtag groupie protestors shutting down their sources of electricity- and under the strain of all their trends going southeast and polar bears romping with the Catlin expedition they’ll be at each other’s throats if the snow starts piling deep in Copenhagen. Recall the ugly split between the founders of Greenpeace. Here is Moore giving a pro-nuclear speech. His remark about a main tactic of greenpeace is very apropos to the AGW cause:
“I want to promote nuclear energy and this is a vehicle to do it,” Moore said. “The purpose of Greenspirit to build a strong grassroots coalition which includes industry labor politicians of all stripes and community leaders to support new nuclear plants.” Moore is now the co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and chairman of Greenspirit Strategies.
He said Greenspirit is “based more on science and logic” than Greenpeace, which he said “depends on scare tactics where there’s no evidence.”
Moore is now the co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and chairman of Greenspirit Strategies.”
Think of the ego driven splits amongst most rock groups of the past.
Missed copying the link:
http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com/media/storage/paper853/news/2009/04/07/Campus/Greenpeace.CoFounder.Lauds.Benefits.Of.Nuclear.Energy-3700036.shtml
To paraphrase a politician friend of mine.
There are 2 types of politicians. Ones who know Human induced Global Warming is a scam and stupid ones.
Things that make you go hmmmm?
Poor Romm! That’s what happens when the government gets their paws into something! It morphs into another government bureaucracy pouring money into something that will just fail. In my opinion…..that is…..
There is an excellent series in the Financial Post by Lawrence Solomon regarding the money behind Cap and Trade and Enron’s roll in this early on.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/30/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx
Climateproject was twittering about a conference call this eve with Al Gore – perhaps rallying the troops.
Sounds more like Wackyman-Malarkey to me.
Mickey Langan (10:50:28) :
I submitted a message to my Senator, Evan Bayh, a Democrat.
…
“unequivocal and complete consensus that global warming is real and is caused by humans”.
Forget “Quote of the week” – this is priceless. We really need some enterprising journalist to video-interview this person and then post it on YouTube. Better still, get Borat to conduct the interview.
As Charles Krauthammer was heard to opine This Week in Washington, Waxman-Markey is useless as China, Russia & India have zero intentions of going along with the West shooting itself in the foot, and have made it clear in no uncertain terms.
It’s ok with the East if the West wants to cede the economy of the world to them. Thank you very much. Our economic recovery will be in a straightjacket, our productivity quadraplegiced, and our currencies reduced to tissue paper.
I have written my Congressman, and he agrees.
Waxman-Markey is a train wreck looking for a place to happen.
CO2 Cap And Tax
Another Bailout for Wall Street
House Dems agree on new climate bill for vote on friday
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124579482359843937.html
As I recall, the last person to seriously raise taxes in a recession was Herbert Hoover. It didn’t work out well.
Please don’t just leave a comment here and complain, write to your Congressional representatives and tell them that Waxman-Markey’s ineffective cap-and-trade-with-massive-offsets approach would lock in climate degradation for more than a decade, vastly increasing the likelihood of climate calamity. This is completely unacceptable. For our sample letter to the White House and Congress on this issue and how to contact your representatives please see our website at: http://www.carbonfees.org/home/?page_id=10. My husband, Allan Zabel and I have been public sector environmental attorneys for more than 20 years. This is the moment to send emails and make phone calls to your representatives. Thank you!
“climate change bill (now 1,090 1,201 pages)”
The constitution of the USA (original copy) has 4 pages.
Yes, you must fight this any way you can. As a Brit I’m seeing first hand the devastating effect carbon credits (our version of cap and trade) is beginning to have on our lives. Energy costs are spiralling out of control and more people fall into energy poverty daily.
Our energy security is at the whim of heavily subsidised and poorly performing “sustainables”, gas-fired powerstations using Russian gas that can be turned off at source without much warning, aging nuclear powerstations, 17 coal-fired power stations facing the axe if they can’t conform to the draconian and completely absurd carbon capture scheme for which there is no suitable technology available.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/17/coal-power-stations-face-shutdown
Quoting from the above article:
…John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, urged the government to make all existing coal plants fit CCS: “If we fail to act, Drax [largest coal power station in UK – my note] will remain one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide in the world for decades,”…
It is blatant lies like this the idiots in Parliament are accepting as gospel without bothering to check anything resembling a scientific fact. I sincerely hope the US doesn’t go down this road because if it does we are all screwed.
Good luck, guys. You are going to need it.
It looks like the USA.gov site is overwhelmed, down, or ?. As soon as the page loads for the House Reps, it goes blank. Refresh or leaving the site and coming back has same results.
http://i42.tinypic.com/30xbvyf.jpg
I just wrote my senator probably vented more than i should have but….
this bill must die quickly and with extreme prejudice or this country will cease to exist in any meaningful fashion, waxman-markey is a bill that is designed to turn the us into a third world country by an ignoramus who has deluded himself into thinking the us has any control over the global temperature. you and other senators would be doing yourself a favor by doing research on websites such as wattsupwiththat.com and climateaudit.com to get the real story on climate that the “scientist” al gore wants you to ignore please kill this bill it will destroy us as a county and as a world power.
[Corrected post to separate quote; please delete previous one.]
My representative in Congress is none other than the very Ed Markey whose name is on this bill, a prime example of the dumbing down of American government, exceeded only by his compeer in the Senate, the execrable Sen. Waxman. We live in a one-party town in a one-party state. Our two Senators are Teddy Kennedy and John Faux Kerry (remember him?). It’s not worth a postage stamp nor an electron to contact these fools.
I keep saying, it’s going to take a prominent spokesman to stand up and tell the American people that ‘climate change’ is a hoax designed by its advocates to lead the sheeple into a corral where they can be quickly fleeced. I wrote to Mitt Romney, suggesting he take the lead, but never received a response. Who else is there? We need a spokesman whom the media cannot ignore.
/Mr Lynn
Jam the phones lines
202-224-3121
No New Tax System