A calm has descended over the federal government’s initiatives in energy amid the furor over health insurance legislation. The respite is welcome, but the sturm und drang of clashing interests will resume in earnest after Congress’s summer recess. There is too much money on the table–our money–for the favor-seekers to ignore.
A Banana Republic?
Increasingly, it is clear that the initial cap-and-trade legislation was insufficiently opaque. Numerous analyses of Waxman-Markey (HR 2454) on this site and others have shown that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will cost consumers dearly by raising the prices of electricity and gasoline, while ignoring viable sources of clean energy that have not yet found the key to the federal treasury.
With so much money at stake, each of the contestants (call them rent-seekers, some of them reluctant players in the political capitalism game) will attempt to gather up as much of the pot as possible.…