Fox Valley Initiative - A Tea Party Group

Cap and Trade

Cap & Trade, also referred to as the Waxman-Markey bill or the American Clean Energy and Security Act is a bill that is currently being debated in the U.S. Congress. The bill has already been passed by the House of Representatives after only 5 hours of debate and will be taken up by the Senate in the fall of 2009. Follow this link to see how your house representative voted http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll477.xml
The legislation aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide.
If the legislation is passed, electric utilities, oil refiners, natural gas producers, and some manufacturers that produce energy on site will be directly regulated by the government.
Each of these regulated companies would be given for free or be required to purchase enough “carbon credits” to emit carbon dioxide to cover their activities. These rights to emit an amount of carbon dioxide, called allowances, would be tradable commodities, meaning those who have extra allowances can sell them to those who don’t.
Over time, the annual amount of these allowances goes down, culminating in an 83 percent reduction in allowances in 2050. In that year, every company who uses fossil fuels would be fighting for allowances that cover only 17 percent of 2005 greenhouse gas emissions.

Although the American population will not be directly regulated, the increased cost of business will predictably be passed on to the consumer.
Since higher energy costs raise production costs, nearly all products will increase in price
The Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution and the National Black Chamber of Commerce all found that the bill will have devastating economic impacts
Spain attempted a similar Cap & Trade system which resulted in 18% unemployment, 2.2 jobs were lost for each green job created, and is currently subsidizing millions of dollars worth of unsustainable green jobs.
Although carbon dioxide(CO2) is demonized by environmental groups, there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

The NBCC estimates that the Waxman-Markey bill will reduce the GDP by $350 billion and could cause the loss of 2.5 million U.S. jobs through 2030 and reduce wages
The Brookings Institute estimates the Cap & Trade bill will reduce the GDP 2.5% in 2050 and unemployment would be .5% higher(1.7 million fewer jobs) in the first decade.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that the Cap & Trade bill from 2012-2035, the average year will lose 1.1 million jobs with 2.5 million fewer jobs in 2035. The average GDP lost is $393 billion, hitting a high of $662 billion in 2035. From 2012 to 2035, the accumulated GDP lost is $9.4 trillion (in 2009 dollars). The average of the climate tax revenue–what the government gets to spend or give away–is $236 billion from 2012 through 2035 and adds up to $5.7 trillion in tax collections.
While the CBO estimated the bill will cost an Average household only $175 per year by 2020, the analysis is misleading and did leave out key calculations. Read this article from the Wall Street Journal to learn more.

While we do not deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we recognize that CO2 is one of the many currently incomprehensible variables that affect the climate. The climate is a complex system where it is impossible for all other internal factors to remain constant and therefore a reliable model or calculation to predict the climate hundreds of years in advanced is extremely unreliable.
Other factors that impact the climate incude but are not limited to the amount of water vapor clouds, the density of water vapor clouds, amount of snow cover, amount of ice cover, amount of liquid water, solar radiation, solar flares, and air currents.
The main absorbers of infrared in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and clouds. Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect.
Models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the Earth or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. Think of your weather man who can rarely accurately predict the weather for a limited region only a few days in advance. Yet global warming advocates claim they can accurately predict the climate for the entire Earth hundreds of years in adance.
For much of the Earth’s history, the atmosphere had much more carbon dioxide than is currently anticipated for centuries to come

Lester Lave, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University was dismissed from a Senate hearing for suggesting that the issue of global warming was scientifically controversial.
Reginald Newell, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost National Science Foundation funding for data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century.
There are many petitions that dispute global warming currently circulating with the signatures of thousands of the world’s top scientists http://www.petitionproject.org/