Tag Archives: Waxman

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The Democrat war on science destroys our prosperity and our consciences

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Here are a couple of stories from IBD showing how the secular-left twists science in order to advance their socialist policy.

Obama’s cap-and-trade bill

The story is here. (H/T The Chilling Effect)

All Americans in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain regions will be most drastically affected because the climate change legislation will destroy the nation’s coal industry and the low-cost electricity it has provided to these regions for generations.

Wealth will be transferred away from almost every state to the West Coast and New England.

…Reliable estimates show that this bill will cost each American family at least $3,000 more in energy costs each year, notwithstanding the $2 trillion cost to the economy in just eight years.

…All these countries have stated that they will not place any restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions. China alone, which has surpassed the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, brings a new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant on line every week. They will have low-cost electricity, and America will massively export more jobs to them.

I blogged here about the costs of this energy tax in more detail.

Stem-cell research

The story is here.

Excerpt:

Inspectors general are apparently not the only ones to pay for annoying the White House by doing their job. The 18-member council existed to provide the president with advice on the moral and ethical implications of the rapid advances in science and medical research. It exists no more.

The council existed to ponder whether we should do something just because we can. Apparently President Obama wanted not advice but agreement on such matters, particularly with regard to one of the panel’s areas of interest, embryonic stem cell research. So he has fired them.

Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer, told the New York Times that Obama saw the panel as “a philosophically leaning advisory group” handpicked by the Bush administration, and that he wanted to appoint a new bioethics commission that instead offered “practical policy options.”

I blogged here about the advantages of adult stem cell research compared to embryonic stem-cell research.

News

How big business and enviro-charlatans benefit from Obama’s cap-and-trade energy tax

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Recently, I posted about the economic effects of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, including how it would impact individual families. I wrote about the true effects of Obama’s green jobs initiative, which will actually decrease employment instead of increasing it.

I also posted before about scientific dissent from global warming, the alleged melting polar ice caps, Obama’s planned tax hikes on oil and gas, deceptive alarmism to procure research funding, the alleged warming of the oceans, and the use of made-up crises in order to impose socialism. You can also read the testimony of a Princeton University physicist who is against global warming alarmism.

Who will pay for cap-and-trade?

ECM e-mailed me this story from PowerLine Blog, which explains how much each state will pay if cap and trade passes. John Hinderacker asks whether Obama things that the electorate is stupid enough to believe that the firms who must absorb this tax will just take it out of their profits and leave consumers untouched. He argues that Obama thinks we are stupid enough to believe that.

One commenter to the post writes:

No, he like many liberals actually believe corporations don’t pass on the tax to consumers but it is extracted from profits (lowering them). Remember, they have a very static, zero-sum view of the world.

This is also my view of Obama. He has been indoctrinated with socialist views and he has no freaking idea why they don’t work. He will be as shocked and surprised as any child is when they first learn that the Tooth Fairy is a myth. But that won’t stop him from nationalizing companies once he sees the mess that his interventions have made. Probably his handlers have this all planned out for him.

And where will that money be redistributed to?

But today I wanted to tell you about the people and corporations that are actively pushing for cap-and-trade, because if it passes they will suddenly become very, very rich.

The full story is posted at Steve Milloy’s Green Hell blog.

Big business meddling in government

Excerpt:

Although many businesses have been coerced into supporting Waxman-Markey, much of big business has actively pushed for the bill. Many Wall Street banks hope to profit from the trading of the $9 trillion in emissions allowances to be created under Waxman-Markey. Goldman Sachs would be the preeminent global warming bookie as it owns the exchanges where carbon allowances would be traded.

General Electric, whose CEO sits on Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, was instrumental in putting together the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a bizarre big business-environmental activist group lobbying consortium that is a primary driver of global warming legislation. USCAP has even taken credit for drafting parts of Waxman-Markey. GE, it seems, would like a federal law requiring electric utilities buy the wind turbines and other energy technologies manufactured by — guess who — GE.

Republican James Sensenbrenner recently asked the Department of Justice to investigate USCAP members General Motors and Chrysler for illegally using taxpayer bailout money to lobby for global warming legislation. AIG, the insurance giant that is now a ward of U.S. taxpayers, only dropped out of USCAP after Rep. Joe Barton pointed out the illegality of accepting federal money and then using it to lobby the federal government.

Enviro-charlatan greed

Excerpt:

And then there’s Al Gore, who stands to become the first “carbon billionaire” through his partnership in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and the UK-based investment firm of Generation Investment Management. When Gore testified in favor of global warming legislation before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, he failed to disclose his personal financial interests and no Senator came close to asking him about them.

When he testified in April before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee in favor of Waxman-Markey, Gore again failed to disclose his conflicts-of-interest. When Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Steve Scalise (R-LA) probed into these matters, Gore feigned ignorance and pretended that he would not personally benefit from Waxman-Markey. Although Rep. Waxman made baseball players testify under oath to Congress about the comparatively petty issue of drug use in baseball, he did not subject Gore to penalty for perjury.

And more fascism, too

Competing for most-appalling character in the Waxman-Markey saga is Rep. Ed Markey. Immediately after the head of Warren Buffet’s electric utility unit testified against Waxman-Markey’s cap-and-trade provision, Markey fired off a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) specifically requesting that Buffet’s utility be investigated. After being rebuked by House Republicans for this blatant intimidation, Markey then asked FERC to expand the requested investigation to all investor-owned utilities, rather than appearing to single out Buffet’s. Now all utilities are under operating with a Markey-pointed gun to their heads.

They told lies about Bush’s “abuses of power” all through his presidency. Now that they are in control, and every new day brings to light more greed, bullying, corruption and fraud than we saw in Bush’s entire eight years in office. And that’s not even to mention that the average unemployment rate under Bush was about half of what it is today under Obama.

Kevin Boland reports on John Boehner’s blog that the bill is up for a floor vote in the House this week.

News

Another way that the secular left kills millions of people

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UPDATE: Welcome readers from the the Western Experience! Thanks for the link, Jason!

On this blog, we’ve talked about how the secular left killed 100 million people in the wars of atheistic communism, and we analyzed why atheism leads naturally to these atrocities by elevating the pursuit of selfish happiness over the human rights of others, (because human rights and rational morality are not rationally grounded on atheism).

We’ve also talked about the 50 million unborn children killed by abortionists in the United States alone, since abortion was made legal. That’s millions of unborn children killed so that adults can be irresponsible about their sexual choices, and not have to deal with the consequences.

But there is another way that leftists kill millions of innocent people…

Here is an article about it from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Green Hell)

Excerpt:

In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world’s poor will suffer as a result.

The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The aim “is to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner,” said WHO and the U.N. Environment Program in a statement on May 6…

“Sadly, WHO’s about-face has nothing to do with science or health and everything to do with bending to the will of well-placed environmentalists,” says Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria. “Bed net manufacturers and sellers of less-effective insecticides also don’t benefit when DDT is employed and therefore oppose it, often behind the scenes.”

UPDATE: You can find more quotations from environmentalists about their real goals in this post.

The biggest mystery in the world is how the secular left managed to paint themselves as rational and non-violent. Maybe we should be reminding them about what it takes to be moral, and why their secular-left worldview doesn’t ground morality. Ideas have consequences. When people on the left try to find meaning and purpose in unscientific delusions like eco-fascism, there will be consequences.

Cap and Trade

And don’t think that we in the West will avoid the consequences of eco-fascism. Once the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill is passed, we can look forward to our own disasters.

The Heritage Foundation lists 10 things we can expect from the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill:

KILLS MORE JOBS AND KILLS THE ECONOMY

Cap and Tax Top Ten List

  1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
  2. It Will Not Make a Substantive Impact on the Environment
  3. It Will Kill Jobs
  4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
  5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
  6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing, and Haircuts
  7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
  8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
  9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
  10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” Under a Cap-and-Trade Program (January 2008) –follow link for video

More details are at the linked article.

Further study

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that this bill will be the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. (H/T Heritage Foundation)

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post notes that the bill creates huge opportunities for fraud, waste and corruption. (H/T Chilling Effect, Heritage Foundation)