Cap-and-Trade Bill Scheduled for Vote Friday
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scheduled a vote Friday on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-California) and Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts).
The House Rules Committee unveiled the latest version of the bill, which weighs in at 1,201 pages. It features new items such as $7.5 billion in “green bonds” for a new federal financing agency called the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, extra emission allowances for politically powerful rural electric cooperatives, greater flexibility for states that want to use free allowances for mass transit, and tweaks benefiting a range of companies, including algae-based biofuel producers and major petroleum refiners.
The legislation “will spark a clean energy transformation that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and confront the carbon pollution that threatens our planet,” Obama said yesterday at a news conference. He added that the bill’s incentives “will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy And that will lead to the development of new technologies that lead to new industries that could create millions of new jobs in America, jobs that can’t
be shipped overseas.”
According to a report by the American Institute for Economic Research, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 will be costly for consumers and refers to the legislation as a “complex and expensive scheme,” and also states that, “How long it will take cap and trade to have a beneficial effect in the switch to renewable energy sources and not just remain, in effect, a large regressive tax is anyone’s guess.”
Dave Camp (R-MI), ranking minority member of the House Ways and Means Committee, opposes the legislation, “The CBO analysis makes clear that this is a new multi-billion dollar tax on every American family.”
The Heritage Foundation has done an analysis of how the Waxman-Markey bill would affect our economy by 2035. Their findings indicate that Waxman’s clean energy bill would:
* Reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $9.6 trillion * Destroy 1,105,000 jobs on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 2,479,000 jobs * Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation * Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 74 percent * Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent * Raise an average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500 * Increase inflation-adjusted federal debt by 26 percent, or $29,150 additional federal debt per person, again after adjusting for inflation.
Additionally, there are many opponents in the scientific commuity who claim that there is no proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activity.
According to Dr. S Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist at George Mason University, Cap and Trade “would be the equivalent of an atomic bomb directed at the U.S. economy—all without any scientific justification.”
