With little fanfare, President Obama is sneaking carbon emission trading in the back door: he’s planning to addict the US to revenues generated by selling carbon permits to fund his expanded healthcare, environmental, and educational agendas.
According to the New York Times:
His administration will attempt to close the large fiscal gap even while starting a major health-care initiative meant to substantially extend coverage; to do so, it foresees increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and using revenues from a new program: selling carbon credits to manufacturers as part of a cap-and-trade plan meant to slow climate change.
Now we have a time-line. Elsewhere in the Times, it is reported that:
… Continue Reading… the 2012 projections include revenues from a source that does not yet exist: a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system.
So, the bad guys are found in the green business, too. Police in Italy have charged eight people, allegedly with Mafia connections, for corrupting local politicians in order to get a project for a wind farm in Sicily assigned to companies close to the Mafia. Honest people in the renewable industry, such as Carlo Durante of the Milan-based Maestrale Green Energy, have pointed out that the main reason why the Mafia can play the renewable game is the confusion and uncertainty in the licensing process, which has too many people involved in giving the authorizations and a great degree of arbitrariness. There is more than a grain of truth in this: It doesn’t apply to the renewable business alone, indeed, but it is a general feature of “doing business” in the country, as a World Bank survey demonstrates eloquently.…
Continue ReadingGovernment policies that arrest economic recovery and diminish economic growth reduce our carbon footprint. Indeed, human misery and carbon reduction are positively correlated in a growing world where consumers demand red-meat energy–oil, gas, and coal. The Malthusian wing of the Obama Administration knows this, and they might just be hoping that the recession will last long enough so that folks question their long-standing belief of economic growth. Rising expectations among the masses is the bane of interventionists and Malthusians everywhere.
So get ready for the end-of-growth mantra from the Left as time marches on and Obama’s economic recovery plan keeps the economy from recovering.…
Continue Reading