There is no question this man is brilliant. (After all, he invented the internet, you know.) Just look at the hoops he has nearly everyone in the world jumping through. If cap and trade becomes the law of the land, guess who gets the greatest financial benefit? See that cheshire grin.
The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.
A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
(Declan McCullagh, CBS News)
Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs. (Sarah Palin)
Prospects for passage of President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade solution for global warming have become decidedly chillier since the idea was first proposed in 2002. Obama wants to cut CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050. He’s got his work cut out for him. Not only are hundreds of credible climate scientists now publicly debunking former vice-president Al Gore’s claims of apocalyptic environmental disaster, a new Gallup poll reveals that 41 percent of Americans believe such alarms are “exaggerated.” Most significantly, more than 650 prominent international scientists now oppose the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)., which are the basis of the Obama proposal. By our math, the 52 authors of the IPCC report who are climate scientists are out-numbered 12-to-1 by their scientific critics.
What is "Cap and Trade"?
The basic concept involves two parties, the governing body and the regulated companies or units emitting pollution. The government sets a cap on pollution, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide and other harmful output that companies, or other groups, are allowed to release. The government then issues credits which allow companies to pollute a certain amount, as long as the aggregate pollution equals less than the set cap.
Since some companies can reduce polluting emissions more inexpensively than other companies, they may engage in trading any extra permits. Companies that can more efficiently reduce pollution sell permits to companies that cannot easily afford to reduce pollution. The companies that sell the permits are rewarded while those that purchase permits must pay for their negative impact. Applied to climate change, this system would theoretically reduce carbon emissions at the lowest total cost.
PRO: The leading legislative bills project a cap and trade system can reduce carbon dioxide by over 80% of 2005 emission levels by 2050 and significantly reduce the rate of global warming. The system will also create billions of dollars for the government to spend on consumer energy programs. Current bills have indicated that government revenues derived from permit sales could be spent on public goods such as road improvements and national parks, as well as the possibility of personal checks being sent to households to offset energy costs.
CON: What many fear is that if businesses and corporations are financially punished for their pollution emissions, the costs will eventually be handed over to the consumers. Basic economic principles state that if a good's price increases, demand usually decreases. However, because energy production is an inelastic good, utility companies can drive up their sale price to cover their rising production costs without seeing a decrease in demand from their customers.
Global Warming Hoax !!
Whenever a story on global warming is featured on TV, either a background image of the cooling tower of a power station, with its white plume of minute water droplets above,or a smokestack belching forth dark plumes of soot, fly ash and other particulates is shown, we are told that carbon dioxide is the culprit. In this mendacious way carbon dioxide is identified as a serious pollutant, and the US is always labelled as the world’s greatest polluter. (Australia is frequently labelled as second to the US). As those of us who went to school before post-modernism took over in the classroom are aware, carbon dioxide is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic gas which is essential to all life on earth.
All green vegetation requires carbon dioxide as plant food and the process of photosynthesis, in which plants take in carbon dioxide, absorb solar radiation, store the carbon and emit oxygen, is basic to life. Now the cause of carbon dioxide’s change in status from vital plant nutrient to toxic pollutant is the global warming campaign. The global warmers’ argument is simple. Carbon dioxide, they say, is a greenhouse gas which is transparent to ultraviolet radiation but significantly opaque to infra-red. As CO2 concentrations increase, then the earth’s surface will increase in temperature. And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by the year 2100 the earth will be warmer by 5.8°C (or 1.4°C if you take the lower estimate) and therefore serious policies of decarbonisation of the world’s economy are necessary to achieve ‘climate stability’. This argument is plausible until you do the numbers. The percentage taken up by CO2 in the greenhouse gas inventory in the atmosphere is about two per cent. Water vapor is the overwhelming greenhouse gas, comprising more than 95 per cent of the total inventory. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere varies with the seasons and with exogenous variables related to solar activity such as sunspots and solar winds. Carbon dioxide cycles naturally through the atmosphere, the earth’s landmass and the oceans. Huge volumes of carbon dioxide are injected into the oceans and atmosphere during earthquakes and volcanoes. The amount of carbon contained in atmospheric dioxide is about 730,000 million tons (730 gigatons of carbon – GtC). The annual carbon flux between the land surface and the atmosphere is estimated at 120GtC; between the oceans and the atmosphere the estimate is 90GtC. The annual emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere resulting from human activities is about 7GtC, less than one per cent of the total atmospheric carbon mass. Changes in the natural carbon flux, as well as human activities, have led to recent increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide; increasing from about 280ppmv to 380ppmv over the past 150 years. Some of this increase is clearly due to the burning of fossil fuels. Some of it is also due to volcanic activity and earthquakes both on land and under the sea. Some is due to the dissolution from the oceans which have warmed since the 1970s.
Compared with the rapid and substantial changes in atmospheric water vapor, changes in atmospheric CO 2 are minute. Greenhouse gas theory requires increasing temperatures in the troposphere compared to surface temperatures and a decrease in radiation from the upper atmosphere to space. Satellite measurements since 1979 show virtually no change in tropospheric temperatures, and increased radiation from earth to space.
(Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering)
Everyone agrees that climate has changed, and will continue to change. But to argue that a small perturbation in CO₂concentrations, a gas on which all life depends and which has reached much higher concentrations in the geological history of the earth, will bring about climate catastrophe is a most improbable story.
Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands
Meteorological Institute
Europeans tend to be strong supporters of the Kyoto Protocol, and many think it shameful that the U.S. has not ratified it. But we have not done so because it is by no means clear that human emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for the small observed warming.
Why, then, do European governments support the Protocol? To quote Margot Wallstrom, the European Union's commissioner for the environment, global warming "is not a simple environmental issue where you can say it is an issue where scientists are not unanimous. This is about international relations, this is about economy, about trying to create a level playing field for big businesses throughout the world. You have to understand what is at stake and that is why it is serious." In other words, the European objective is to put the United States at a competitive disadvantage. It costs Europe nothing to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, since they did so when they switched from high-sulfur coal to North Sea natural gas, and Germany shut down many highly polluting East German factories. But it would cost the U.S. a great deal. So much for the European moral high ground.
Despite claims to the contrary, the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did not show that human activities are responsible for global warming. Its conclusions were based on computer models of the earth's climate. However, the problem is so complex that the art of constructing such models is still in its infancy. The uncertainties are so great that the claim by the IPCC that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" is "likely" to be unfounded. The Earth has been warming erratically for 10,000 years (since the last ice age). That has been good, up to now, because it's what made the non-equatorial latitudes habitable. We can expect that warming trend to continue, no matter what we do about carbon dioxide. Nonsense by any other name is still nonsense.
By Gerald Marsh
Mr. Marsh is a physicist who has managed the implementation of an important weather forecasting program for the U.S. Air Force. Comments about this piece can be sent to him at gmarsh@nationalcenter.org.
Existing models cannot mimic many of the key features of the existing climate system. Atlantic hurricanes and European droughts to El Niño's and the ice ages all elude their algorithms. Modellers have in the past soft-pedalled on the uncertainties in their models, in order to make their case that climate change was real.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, New York
Taroh Matsuno of Japan's Frontier Centre for Global Change, says these models cannot reproduce rainfall patterns in the tropics. The British government's top adviser on climate, Brian Hoskins of Reading University adds: "Models can’t yet simulate the glacial cycle. Many people won't believe them until they can."
Michael Crichton makes the case that "ALIENS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING" See his web site...http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
