According to press reports, the drive for “cap and trade” legislation has finally died in the Senate.

A New York Times story reports:

Bowing to political reality, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said the Senate would not take up legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions blamed as a cause of climate change, but would instead pursue a more limited measure focused on responding to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and tightening energy efficiency standards.

“We know where we are,” Mr. Reid told reporters after reviewing the state of energy legislation with Senate Democrats and administration officials. “We know that we don’t have the votes.”

In a city where few people with power ever bow to reality — political or otherwise — the seeming-defeat of “cap and trade” may constitute one of the few victories for sanity in this legislative cycle. And the end — for now — of “cap and trade” is the latest in a series of developments in the realm of environmentalism since the theory of anthropogenic climate change came under widespread public scrutiny during the past year.

In the heady days before the “Climategate” debacle, President Obama made “cap and trade” a significant element of his environmental legislative agenda. As Obama stated in on “Earth Day” in 2009:

So there's no question that we have to regulate carbon pollution in some way; the only question is how we do it.
I believe the best way to do it is through legislation that places a market-based cap on these kinds of emissions.

The so-called “carbon pollution” is, in fact, carbon dioxide, which is produced by many ‘natural’ processes, including human respiration, as well as many of the activities attendant with human civilization ranging from wood stoves to internal combustion engines to manufacturing.

The supposedly “market-based cap” had little to do with a genuinely free market, since it was based on a governmentally induced artificial reduction in the ability to generate carbon dioxide. Again, in Obama’s words from April 22, 2009:

And here's how a market-based cap would work:  We'd set a cap, a ceiling, on all the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that our economy is allowed to produce in total, combining the emissions from cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants, energy-intensive industries, all sources.

And by setting an overall cap, carbon pollution becomes like a commodity.  It places a value on a limited resource, and that is the ability to pollute.  And to determine that value, just like any other traded commodity, we'd create a market where companies could buy and sell the right to produce a certain amount of carbon pollution....

Over time, as the cap on greenhouse gases is lowered, the commodity becomes scarcer — and the price goes up.  And year by year, companies and consumers would have greater incentive to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency as the price of the status quo became more expensive.

Such a system is, of course, far from “market-based” since it is based on an artificial, government-induced, limitation on production of a natural byproduct of life. “Cap and trade,” if implemented, would have been simply one more crippling blow to what little remains of American industry. The sweeping, invasive system of regulation and taxation that rest at the heart of any such “cap and trade” scheme were simply untenable, given the ongoing financial crisis in the United States. Furthermore, Obama's own words demonstrate that such a system was never truly based in a “market solution”; rather, “cap and trade” was intended to cooerce an entire economy to submit to an artificial scarcity in government permission to "pollute."

In the words of the New York Times:

The decision was a major disappointment to conservation groups and lawmakers who had invested months in trying to negotiate legislation. The House last year passed its own climate change bill, a proposal that has created a backlash for some politically vulnerable Democrats. The outcome was also viewed as a setback by some utility executives who had hoped that Congress would set predictable rules governing carbon pollution.

Undoubtedly the decision is a disappointment to such individuals, but that does not mean the legislation was good legislation, or that the theory behind their regulatory zeal reflects reality. The science behind the theory of climate change has faced fundamental challenges in regard to its methodology and even the credibility of many of the key individuals and institutions involved in the research has been called into question. The troubles confronting the theory of manmade climate change are not limited to the scandal now known as “Climategate”; NASA’s climate data has proven suspect and credibility of the once vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was undermined by a review which revealed that much of the “science” cited to defend the report’s conclusions had not been peer reviewed.

The House passed its version of cap and trade in 2009 as part of the build up for last December’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Intense pressure from environmental extremists, and UN bureaucrats eager to use global environmental legislation to restructure the economy of the entire planet, seemed virtually impossible to resist — right up until the moment when the conference collapsed.

However, the failure of both the Copenhagen conference and the collapse of “cap and trade” certainly does not signal the end of the global agenda of radical environmentalism. This year, the COP 16 Climate Change Conference will be held in late November and early December in Cancun, Mexico—a venue less likely to subject the conference to the public ridicule that cold and snow heaped on last year’s conference in Denmark. And once the election year frenzy has passed after the November elections, advocates of “cap and trade” will survey the new political landscape and evaluate their prospects for the next legislative cycle.

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rprew said:

What this really means... is that the Senate is going to rename the monstrosity and try to ram it through the back door before anyone gets wise. To the Insiders, "NO" never means "no" where their agenda is concerned.

July 26, 2010

Flu-Bird said:

Too bd al ore and greens Too bad for AL GORE and the hardline greens but CAP & TRADE looks dead looks like SCARY HARRY REID is going to lose the vote of GREENPEACE for failing to tote the line on their radical eco-freak ideas

July 26, 2010

Bob L. said:

Progressives "progress" If they can't knock down the entire house at one time, they will settle for knocking it down one wall at a time. Look for more, smaller pieces of Cap and Trade to come up over time.

July 26, 2010

Red Pill Please said:

Keep 'Cap & Tax' in the Grave! Bob Chapman offers an excellent insight into this demonic influenced legislation: Why is Cap and Trade so important? Because the Cap and Trade bill calls for the creation of what are called "carbon credits." So why is that significant? Well, that is because carbon credits will be used to back the new world reserve currency called SDR's. Carbon credits will be used in lieu of gold, oil or any other tangible physical asset. After all, carbon credits are the ultimate when it comes to creating a new fiat valued asset or commodity. The Illuminists can make these carbon credits appear out of thin air just as they do with our Federal Reserve Notes based on totally subjective and politically controlled standards that will be used to bring profits and financial benefits to Illuminist cronies (that would include Obama, Maurice Strong and Goldman Sachs, to name but a few of the partners in, and potential beneficiaries of, the Cap and Trade scam). At the same time these carbon credits will be used to destroy Illuminist enemies and to control their serfs (that would be you, Joe Public) by moving the wealth of the non-Illuminist serfs and the non-Illuminist businesses of the developed world into the international banking cabal's SDR's and also into third world nations in a move calculated to level the playing field in preparation for implementation of world government. http://theinternationalforecas..._Economy[ /url]

July 27, 2010

Red Pill Please said:

Broken URL http://theinternationalforecas...he_Economy http://theinternationalforecas..._Economy[ /url]

July 27, 2010