We The People of Longview, TX

Washington (CNN) — Democrats admit that when it comes to passing comprehensive energy and climate change legislation, they simply do not have the votes.

So in an effort to get something through, the Senate’s top Democrat announced that he will introduce a smaller bill in the coming days focusing on specific energy needs. Continue reading…

President Obama recently used the Gulf oil spill to stress the need for Congress to pass cap and trade, specifically the bill introduced by Senators John Kerry (D–MA) and Joe Lieberman (I–CT) after much delay. The 987-page American Power Act (APA) aims to reduce 2005 levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the same target that the House version passed last year.

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By declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to it by Congress.  It has done this in a proceeding known as the “endangerment finding,” say George Allen, a former U.S. senator and governor from Virginia, and Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

The EPA’s endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade, burdening America with a regulatory regime more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, say Allen and Lewis:  Continue reading…

It’s sobering to compare this pessimistic 3 percent GDP loss as a result of climate change by 2100 to the CBO’s projected loss of up to 3.5 percent of GDP due to carbon rationing by 2050, five decades earlier. Unless carbon rationing is designed and implemented perfectly, the losses incurred from government policies that aim to combat climate change will easily outweigh the losses that could result from climate change. The Kerry-Lieberman carbon rationing scheme is far from perfect. Continue reading…

The Detroit News

The betting in Washington is that the cap-and-trade carbon bill introduced in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut hasn’t got a chance of passing this year. That may explain why public outcry against yet another economy-choking piece of legislation has been fairly muted.

But we’re not taking anything for granted, remembering that in January, after Scott Brown scored his stunning victory in the Massachusetts race for the U.S. Senate, the smart money said that health care reform was dead, too. And look what happened.

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There is little doubt that legislative measures designed to address global warming would greatly burden the agricultural sector. Farming is energy intensive, and cap-and-trade bills–namely the House Waxman-Markey bill, which passed in June, and the Boxer-Kerry bill pending in the Senate–are essentially a massive tax on energy.

Continue reading article from The Heritage…

Can the Obama administration’s desperate attempts to cover their true far left nature with centrist rhetoric and promises become any more transparent? Yesterday, the President announced “an expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration” in selected areas off the coasts of the United States. The President claims this announcement was made “in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs,” but nobody believes him. Just take a quick look at today’s newspaper reporting:
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Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanise support among Republicans and industry groups.

The proposed legislation, encouraged by President Barack Obama, dilutes a climate bill that stalled last year in the Senate. The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.

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