The Spinning Begins
Predictably, President Obama said today that he’s confident that the U.S. Senate will pass National Energy Tax legislation. Meanwhile, House GOP Leader John Boehner criticized the Waxman-Markey legislation for killing jobs and increasing taxes on the middle class.
Obama said House members who narrowly voted to pass the climate bill on Friday had put progress before petty Washington politics, and urged Senators to do the same ahead as they embark on a rocky road to their own vote.
“The House of Representatives came together to pass an extraordinary piece of legislation,” Obama said, at an event in the White House announcing new plans to improve energy efficiency across the United States. “In the months to come, the Senate will take up its version of the energy bill. And I am confident that they, too, will choose to move this country forward.”
What the 219 representatives did wasn’t to put progress ahead of petty politics. They voted to increase taxes on the middle class, the working poor and small businesses.
This isn’t “an extraordinary piece of legislation.” It’s a huge job-killing tax increase that will kill jobs in hard hit places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wyoming, West Virginia and Kentucky. Here’s House GOP Leader Boehner’s response to President Obama:
Americans need real solutions to create jobs, lower energy prices, and clean up the environment, but Speaker Pelosi’s national energy tax is a recipe for driving up prices for middle-class families and small businesses and shipping more American jobs overseas. The President repeated his claim that this bill will create jobs, but independent analysts suggest it’s a job killer, while one of his prominent supporters, Warren Buffett, calls it a huge, regressive tax.
Republicans believe there is a better route to more jobs, reliable energy, and a cleaner, healthier environment. Our all-of-the-above plan will increase American energy production in an environmentally-safe way, encourage the use of alternatives such as nuclear and clean-coal energy, and promote new technologies and efficiencies. Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress and the Administration have chosen to go it alone with their costly, jobs-killing national energy tax scheme. Middle-class families and small businesses struggling during this recession won’t support it. It’s time for Democrats to work with Republicans on real solutions to create jobs and pave the way for a cleaner, more reliable energy future.
Why would Democrats even think about bankrupting fossil fuel-burning power plants? Why would they want to kill the economies of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming and Kentucky while we’re in the midst of a terrible economy? Is it that Democrats don’t care about the blue collar workers in those states? Is it because they’re so blinded by their ideology that they refuse to rethink things? Or, perhaps, is it because they can’t afford to ignore the environmental extremists because they’ll need their campaign contributions?
I think it’s most of the above. I think they’re blinded by their ideology and I think they can’t afford to bite the hand that writes the campaign contributions. (You’ve noticed that they didn’t give consideration to doing what’s right for the country, right?)
The White House certainly will try justifying their actions with clever spin. The bad news for the Obama administration is that people are tired of the spin. The worst news for the Obama administration is that people are tired of his administration not producing cost-effective solutions.
Thus far, the Obama administration hasn’t shown that they’re problem solvers. Thus far, the only thing they’ve proven is that they’re world class ideologues.
That won’t cut it when people’s wallets are stretched to the breaking point.
Technorati Tags: Energy, Environment, Tax Increases, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, President Obama, Elections, Democrats, John Boehner, Republicans
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
June 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am
In 1983, one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in
human history was achieved. This breakthrough was revelaed by Carl
Sagan in a live, heated debate with William F. Buckley, which was
broadcast after the premiere showing of the television movie The Day
After. It was here that Sagan introduced the concept of a nuclear
winter. Sagan also discussed nuclear winter in an article published by
Parade magazine. “”Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple
Nuclear Explosions”, also known as the TTAPS study, was published in
Science.
According to the TTAPS study, much of the dust raised by nuclear
explosions would end up suspended above the troposphere, which is the
lower part of the atmosphere. This would reflect some sunlight back
into space, and thus lower global temperatures. The study concluded
that a five thousand megaton nuclear exchange can cause a temperature
drop of about eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit.
This was truly a historic paper, along the lines of Einstein’s “On
the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and Darwin’s “Origin oof the
Species”. Clearly, dust in the upper atmosphere would plunge
temperatures, and humanity had the capacity to reduce temperatures by
eighty-four degrees with existing technology. This was reiterated in
the book The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War , written
by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr
Roberts.
It was about ten years after that when another threat was
discussed. This time, it dealt with warming temperatures cuased by
increased carbon dioxide emissions. Rising temperatures would cause
droughts in California, floods in Bangladesh, cause polar bears to be
extinct, cause tropical diseases to spread, all sorts of calamities.
Vice President Al Gore presented this in his movie An Inconvenient
Truth, for which he won a Nobel prize. And all of this is supposed to
result from an increase of two degrees.
It is clear, therefore, that if humanity can reduce global
temperatures by eighty-four degrees, they can reduce global
temperatures by a mere two degrees.
The threat of global warming resulted in the House of
Representatives passing a bill dealing with this. Surely, we can
expect dust to be injected in the upper atmosphere to reduce sunlight,
perhaps even seeing mushroom clouds rise up once again at the Nellis
test site.
Except that the bill does not propose the obvious solution.
Instead, it enacts a cap and trade system, which would impose higher
taxes, thus raising energy costs in an attempt to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions.
One must wonder why this is being proposed as the solution, instead
of blanketing the upper atmosphere with dust. In fact, it seems the
TTAPS study was erased from the government’s consciousness. There is,
in fact, no proof that reducing carbon dioxide emissions would reduce
global temperatures. Clearly, the most obvious solution to this threat
to human civilization is being deliberately ignored in favor of some
complex regulatory scheme which would destroy the economy.
It is here that we get into the crux of the matter. The
environmentalist lobby is not about saving the environment, but
destroying Western industrial civilization. The Kyoto treaty, which
was about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, was only aimed at Western
industrial nations. This war on global warming is really a war on
Western industrial civilization.
April 26th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I found your blog really interesting, do you mind if I link it from mine?