Cap and trade, which was a pipe dream just a year ago, is in grave danger of becoming law. The question remains, will it attract enough votes to pass the Senate?
For the uninitiated, cap and trade is simply another name for the carbon offset scheme many of the green extremists have been pushing for some time. With carbon offsets you get to pollute all you want and pay some company that invests in green energy and you’re square. Al Gore did this when he made his propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Even though he had, by his own admission, flown all over the world to give his little slide show ’at least a thousand times’ and despite the fact that hundreds of people consumed untold fossil fuels and belched tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, they paid carbon offsets so everything was cool. Of course, the company they paid the offsets to was Al Gore’s company. Not cool.
Carbon offsets are the equivalent to paying $300 for a hooker on Saturday night then dropping 300 bucks in the collection plate on Sunday morning. You’re square, right? This sort of madness is fine if na’ve dirt people want to throw their money down a rat hole. It becomes a completely different matter when corporations and utilities are forced to do the same.
That’s cap and trade. Let’s say Utility A has some allotments to release ’X’ amount of CO2 into the air. Now, we all know that carbon dioxide is a harmless gas, one that we exhale with every breath and plants use to make oxygen. No, no, no. The dirt people have turned CO2 into a poison. Therefore, companies and utilities who have spent millions, if not billions, on pollution suppression equipment that turns their noxious gases into CO2, they’re out of luck. Once they reach their allotment of CO2 they have to buy more allotments from a utility that still has some because they haven’t gone over their allotment. That means we’ll see all sorts of wind farms and solar fields crop up just waiting to take the money from your utility. We all know that wind and solar can’t produce nearly the energy your own utility can but that’s not the point. The point is redistribution of wealth. These green companies now get to come in and steal money from the energy producers.
Well, big deal, you say. Yes, it is very much a big deal. Who do you think is going to pay that extra money the utility has to pay the wind farmer? The utility? Don’t be ridiculous. No, it’s you. The utility will simply raise its rates.
A recent Heritage Foundation study came to some frightening conclusions. This cap and trade bill will destroy upwards of 2 million jobs. It will raise electricity rates by 90 percent. In other words, take a look at your electric bill and pretty much double it. It’ll raise gasoline prices by 74 percent. Instead of gas costing $3 this summer it’ll be $5.22 per gallon. All this at a time when we’re trying to pull the economy out of the ditch.
What’s really amazing is that the whole global warming theory has fallen completely apart yet the lemmings in Congress keep marching toward the cliff. Temperature tracking stations around the world show that we’ve been cooling for the last decade. More and more scientists are becoming skeptical and more and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that this is, and always has been, a scheme to redistribute wealth. Maybe we should cap and trade Congress.
Phil Valentine is an author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host with Westwood One. For more of his commentary and articles, visit philvalentine.com.
