I was interested when I first heard the potential impending global destruction that would result from our failing to make drastic cuts to our carbon imprint.  We were told that if we do not cut our use of fossil fuels the earths temps would melt the ice caps and raise the sea level.

Twenty years ago the UN warned that we had 10 years to act in order to save the planet.

We all saw the charts showing an increase in global temps. 

I can’t help but notice that the alarmists have managed to position themselves to personally benefit if the world will embrace their claims.

Al Gore comes to mind.  When he was questioned at an event last week in Wisconsin about the inaccuracies of his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, the questioners microphone was cut off.  Gore did not take more questions.

If Gore believed his own prophesy, would he continue to fly by private jet that leaves such a huge “carbon footprint”?  Would his home use 20x the energy of the average home?

These alarmists stopped using their charts a few years ago when it became apparent that the increase in temps ceased in 1998.

These same alarmists who go around yelling “the sky is falling” ignore a basic fact.

Our earth has gone through heating & cooling cycles for millions of years.  Long before there were any cars. 

They do not want to discuss the earths natural cycles, because that would undermine their attempts to steal more of our money with a phony Cap & Trade ruse.

Bring up the fact of the cooler temps we have experienced the past several years and the alarmists eyes glaze over.

They go so far as to bury reports that do not support their claims.

Cap & Trade is a naked attempt to create a new scheme to get other peoples money.  A lot of the money will go to poorer nations.

I do favor becoming less dependent on foreign fuel sources.

We could develop alternative fuels to get off foreign supplies.  Solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are available.  So is using our own coal, natural gas, and oil deposits.

Cap & Trade will be the largest confiscatory “tax” ever imposed on Americans.

They want to start a new industry, for their profit, and they want us to fund it for them.

Climate change has many scientists that support the theory.  There are also many scientists who claim it is wrong.

If we all stopped driving tomorrow would the earths natural heating & cooling cycles stop?  No.

China & India have said they will not agree to these cuts.  If we go forward with them, we will put the US at a competetive disadvantage.  Our industries will be burdened with additional costs that these other countries will not be.  Companies will simply move their production off-shore.

Commerce Secretary, Locke has publicly said that the US should pay for China’s carbon emissions.  That is one of the stupidist comments uttered in this debate.

Soon the Democrats are going to attempt to impose the Cap & Trade bill on us.  They want our money. 

Voters will have to take a stand & speak out against this blatant heist of our remaining wealth.  To allow it to get passed will cause an across the board increase in prices.  Similar to the VAT that several Dems have suggested.

Americans do need to be smart on energy, but we can not afford the democrats Cap & Tax scam.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/
http://hubpages.com/hub/Earths-Temperature-Brief-History-of-Recent-Change
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_dacf39c7-c2f8-5718-a5a0-d0cfb39f80bc.html
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=618074
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3229696&page=1
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm
http://newsbusters.org/node/11345
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6

Anyone see the amount of snow out west this weekend.  Denver Rockies had their baseball game cancelled due to bad weather.  Not rain, but snow.

NY Times op-ed from Senators Kerry and Graham:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11kerrygraham.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=graham&st=cse

Snow or rain over the weekend as a reliable means to judge global warming???? Your
post is more stupid than normal.

cc - I still smell a money grab, and believe this theory is a scam.  I also provided links.

_________________________________________________________________________

from - I mentioned the snow as a statement on irony.  The post & links supported my position.

      Anything you want to say about the rest of the post or links?

Folks, aside from my friends drama in the above post, I ask another question,

If Obama cuts medicare spending over the next 10 years by $300-500 BILLION and does not reduce the amount of seniors relying on Medicare, are we not simply having the same amount of seniors fighting over a smaller pool of money?

How will that be dealt with?  A reasonable person would rightly realize that the people who oversee medicare will have to make choices on what is treated and what is not.

They are covering the same amount of people with less money.

This is taking the $300-500 Billion from the seniors and spending it on the young.

As for the coal burning plants they should have the scrubbers to reduce emissions.

I do not favor abandoning the coal industry.

The above post speaks volumes of the posers intellect.

Ahh, Yes—2012—-The Annointed Judge and Jury of Intellect—-Does your ASSinine Arrogance know no bounds?? Aren’t you late for your presentation to the Mensa Group, Einstein?? Why would anyone with your superior intellect waste your precious time hiding be- hind some WalMart computer posting on a local forum? Aren’t your services needed in the Middle East or to instruct so of the Professors at MIT?—-

Why wait ‘til 2012? How in Hell did the GOP lose last year with such brilliance as yours to lead them??  And you would have had time for world peacw after lunch—

When you get a chance, ease on down to the projects and help us brothers out with this racist thing, O K? Show us some love, Man!!

There were a lot of instances that I consider that the environment had giving the consequences to the people who have been overused the environment. Weathers have been changing and so with the unlikely things is happening now in the environment and this things makes every people worried about it.

2012—-Do you even understand Cap and Trade?? Current GreenHouse Caps limit by permit the amount of gases that a region can emit—-Trade is the under-the-table trading and swapping(paying) between companies who have reached that limit, allowing more emmisions with bought permits which go to the fossil-fuel producers of that region(Good Ol’ Boys)—With the proposed Cap and Trade Laws,that money goes to the people and regions affected—

Take a short trip to western VA, W. Virginia and parts of Kentucky and I’ll show you a few of the health-deprived people of poverty and the raped, destroyed land of these regions—All in the name of greed and profit for these Capitalist Company Giants who line the pockets of corrupt Politicians—

Can you show us where it says it goes to the people of a region?

Emitters will be given a cap on what they may emmit.  They will be allowed to trade unused portions of this.

It is going to drive up the cost of everything that is touched by fossil fuels whether it be by production or transportation.  It will have an adverse effect on peoples finances and lives.

Commerce Secretary Locke even suggested we should pay for China’s emissions.  That is a stupid idea.

China & India have rejected the idea.  Our employers will be at a competetive disadvantage in a global economy.  They will move production to where they are profitable.

How much more money are you willing to pay out of your pocket for junk science?

How many more jobs are you willing to send oversea?

I agree we should be smart and turn to alternative fuel sources as I said earlier.

I am not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water.

2012—-Are you such a chilid as to always have to be shown where to find something or given a link?? You really should try researching and thinking for yourself rather that depending on your GOP trainers to find your biased links for you—-Your description describes cap and trade as it exists under the existing GOP polocies—-

So you won’t have to think so much (I know it makes a one-sided mind hurt) try junior college Cap and Trade 101—-Read reports from Sightline Institute—WSJ.com—UCSUSO.com—factcheck.com and even wikipedia 0r American Progress.com—-

If you read my post correctly I said the region and the people—-And for a little more info for you, these are the same people, more than 1,600 who stood in weather and in line for more than 2 days to get simple dental, vision, and health care by volunteer doctors and nurses. The children who stand by the tracks each Christmas to catch some candy and small toys thrown out by the volunteers of the Santa Train.. These are the people I know and work with each day—

China turned down the idea?? Isn’t this the same country that had to work more than a year and spend Billions just to make the air breathable and fight the Smog in order to host the Olympics??Nice Analogy, little one—-Now, would you like to compare the number of vehicles and industries between the U.S.A. and India???

Junk Science?? Junk Science exists only in the small-minded who have no understanding of ANY science.

It appears the requirement to buy carbon credits is the incentive for dirty energy producers to invest in cleaner alternatives.  Until the alternatives are viable and dependable, our utility costs will increase and so will those of manufacturers, distributers and retailers.  Negative impacts to American families will be two-fold as the dirty energy producers will not only pass along the costs of the credits but also their research & development costs. 

I would like to see the carbon credit requirement pushed out several years and an immediate tax deduction (or other types of incentives such as research grants) for clean energy investments.  10 years from now would be the time to penalize those producers who haven’t stepped forward.  Penalizing them today just seems to put the carriage before the horse and as long as they are willing to buy the credits, they can keep producing dirty energy; solving no environmental problem while increasing costs to the consumer.

Rome was not built in a day.

Folks, Freddie chose to ignore the actual affect on households in both out of pocket increased expenses & lost jobs, while taking his cheap shots.

Here is a summary from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), that addresses both of these issues.  While I do not claim to come anywhere near to Freddie’s highly developed understanding of the issue or overall intellect, I can read a plainly written report to see how my family will be impacted by this scam.

Estimated Costs per Household

The GHG cap-and-trade program established under H.R. 2454 would impose
costs on U.S. households and provide some financial benefits, as well as the
benefits associated with any changes in the climate that would be avoided as a
result of the legislation. (This analysis addresses only those financial benefits.)
The costs would be incurred through higher prices for the goods and services that
households consumed, and the incidence of those costs would be determined
primarily by households’ consumption patterns. In the aggregate, most of those
costs would be offset by income or other benefits provided to households as a
result of the distribution of the value of the emission allowances.

The legislation would influence how much of that value was conveyed to various households by
specifying how to allocate the allowances. For example, H.R. 2454 would direct
some of that value to low-income households by specifying that 15 percent of the
allowance value be used to provide energy rebates and tax credits for such
households.

Gross Compliance Costs

Gross compliance costs would consist of the cost of emission allowances, the cost
of both domestic and international offset credits, and the resource costs incurred
in order to reduce the use of fossil fuels:

The cost of the allowances. The cost of acquiring allowances would become a
cost of doing business. In most cases, the firms required to hold the
allowances would not bear that cost; rather, they would pass it onto their
customers in the form of higher prices.

■ The cost of both domestic and international offset credits. Like the cost for
allowances, the cost of acquiring offset credits would be passed on by firms to
their customers in the form of higher prices.

■ The resource costs associated with reducing emissions. The resource costs
would include the value of the additional resources (including nonmonetized
resources, such as time) required to reduce emissions—for example, by
generating electricity from natural gas rather than from coal, by making
improvements in energy efficiency, or by changing behavior to save energy
(by carpooling, for example).

According to CBO’s estimates, the gross cost of complying with the GHG capand-
trade program delineated in H.R. 2454 would be about $110 billion in 2020
(measured in terms of 2010 levels of consumption and income), or about $890
per household (see Table 1). Of that gross cost, 96 percent would be the cost of
acquiring allowances or offset credits. The reminder would be the resource costs
associated with reducing emissions.

As noted, firms would generally pass the cost of reducing their emissions—or of
acquiring offset credits or emission allowances—on to their customers, and their
customers’ customers. (Indeed, assuming that higher costs are passed into prices
is customary in distributional analyses.) Households and governments would bear
those costs through their consumption of goods and services. Because households
account for the bulk of spending, they would bear most of the costs.

Transitional Costs
The measure of costs described above reflects the costs that would occur once the
economy had adjusted to the change in the relative prices of goods and services. It
does not include the costs that some current investors and workers in sectors of
the economy that produce energy and energy-intensive goods and services would
incur as the economy moved away from the use of fossil fuels.

To be sure, increased production of energy from non-fossil-fuel sources (such as wind or
solar) and a shift to more energy-efficient production processes would create jobs
and profit opportunities as well.

However, those jobs might be in different regions of the country or require different skills than the jobs being lost, and the profit opportunities might arise from different types of capital; their availability would
mute but not eliminate the costs of the transition.

Thus, investors would see the value of some stocks decline, and workers would face higher risk of
unemployment as jobs in some sectors were eliminated. Stock losses would tend
to be widely dispersed among investors because shareholders typically diversify
their portfolios.

In contrast, the costs of unemployment would probably be
concentrated among relatively few households and, by extension, their
communities. The magnitude of those transitional costs would depend on the pace
of emission reductions, with more rapid reductions leading to larger costs.

Although large segments of the U.S. economy either do not face
significant foreign competition (for example, the electricity and transportation
sectors) or involve trade with countries that have a cap-and-trade program (the
European Union, for example), some important manufacturing industries, such as
steel, face competition from countries that do not face the costs of such a system.

Some regions and industries would experience substantially higher rates of unemployment and job turnover as the program became increasingly stringent. That transition could be particularly difficult for
individuals employed in those industries (such as the coal industry) or living in
those regions (such as Appalachia). However, any aggregate change in
unemployment would be small compared with the normal rate of job turnover in
the economy.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090620/cbowaxmanmarkey.pdf

To make matters worse, the already passed House bill includes 27 months of unemployment benefits should one lose their job due to the legislation.  I’m not opposed to unemployment benefits but I am opposed to our Congress passing a law which they expect to be detrimental to the financial stability of American families.

This bill/proposal really isn’t about climate change at all.  It’s about creating a derivative market so fat cats can get fatter.  Maybe we should all save our pennies to buy shares of the coming ‘carbon index.‘  As demand for the offset credits increase, the price of the credits will soar.  How has the mortgage derivatives worked out for us?

As for my friend ignoring my comments about India and changing the subject to a lower level discussion on the comaprision between our two countries number of cars, here is a take away from Hillary Clinton’s trip to India in July, where she attempted to press them on the carbon emissions.

“Indian Environmet Minister, Ramesh, broke away from the saccharine tone of most of Clinton’s meetings with the country’s leaders by bluntly reiterating India’s position that it would not accept binding emissions cuts. “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,“ Ramesh said to Clinton at a conference on climate change in Gurgaon, near New Delhi, on July 19. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.“ Clinton defused the situation by asserting that the U.S. would not take any step to limit India’s economic growth.“

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1911878,00.html

As we can see directly from the Indian government, they have no intention of complying with such a request.

India’s manufacturing base will have an advantage over ours, because they will not be hit with such draconian restrictions.

Their workforce will also benefit as more of our jobs move overseas to avoid the impact of this law.
__________________________________________________________________________________

As for our trade and employment disadvantage with China, that will only worsen under this protocol.  They too, have flatly rejected the Obama administrations request for participation.
China minister rejects U.S. pollution duty idea

WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) - China’s top climate change official rejected as protectionist on Wednesday a U.S. idea to put tariffs on some imports from countries that do not place a price on carbon, chiding the United States to do more to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday told a congressional panel that once Washington develops a system limiting carbon emissions, if other countries do not impose a cost on carbon emissions the United States will be at a disadvantage.

Unlike the United States, China joined the Kyoto Protocol but is not required to cut its emissions because it is a developing country.

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN18469068

Like I also pointed out in the original post, Obama’s Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, has said Americans should pay for China’s emissions since we buy their products.

That tangible was not acounted for in the above CBO report and would only serve to drive prices even higher than we will experience if the law is passed here.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - To address the serious threat of global warming, Americans should be required to “pay” for the carbon content of goods they consume from countries around the world, a top U.S. official said on Friday.

“It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America—and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that,“ Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE56G1A320090717