Waxman-Markey is a disaster
That’s my opinion. No one really cares all that much tho. But, maybe they would if I had some uppity title like Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That’d be kind of impressive dontcha think? Well, I can’t claim the title, but the guy who can, Dr, James Hansen, has. He doesn’t like Cap and Trade at all. His issues with Waxman-Markey:
- It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
- It sets meager targets — 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year’s level — and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious “offsets,” by which other nations are paid to preserve forests – while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
- Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, “has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives.”
- It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, “businesses and households won’t be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense,” thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.
And his summary?
The fact is that the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. Their bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It’s less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Now, ya think MSNBC and CNN will listen to some with a title like that? I’m not holding my breath either.