Following-up to longer discussion over the weekend on the topic, the Senate Environment, Water, & Energy Committee held a public hearing on SB 5735, the Senate version of the cap & trade legislation under debate.
Sen. Jerome Delvin (R - Richland), speaking on the measure:
Since July, Washington has lost more than 24,000 jobs. Under cap-and-tax the cost of electricity, natural gas, fuel - and any product made or transported in Washington will skyrocket. It's an economy-killer. Our small businesses can barely keep their doors open now. Jobs are hanging by a thread.This is not about changing the environment. Our state is already so clean if we reduced our emissions to zero it would result only in a .00135 percent decline in CO2. No, this is not about the environment; it is about the state getting more tax money - and this will give government the mother lode.
If you don't believe this bill will kill jobs just look at California. Companies are fleeing from that state in order to remain competitive. And California is bankrupt. Cap-and-tax is not only a bad idea...it's a disaster.
That about sums it up. Link re: the woes of California here.
Clean environment? Yes. Expand new industries in Washington state? Sure. Kill existing jobs with higher energy costs? No, thanks.
Posted by Eric Earling at February 03, 2009 01:37 PM | Email ThisCap and Trade will open another opportunity for market manipulation and financial gains for the qualifying agencies while not providing a valid solution to green house gas reduction. There are no "standardized protocols" for calculating carbon emissions or green house gases. Several national and international organizations have sprung up with differing "opinions" on how green house gases should be calculated. Most are well positioned to "capitalize" on such a proposal with little energy or environmental experience. Once again the financiers will gain at the expense of the economy and the environment.
Political agendas to date have taken precedence over existing proven engineering standards. A prime example is the energy efficiency field. This 30+ year undertaking has reduced green house gases by reducing the need for new power generation. However are the newly appointed experts "hitch hiking" on the experience, not at all, they are inventing their own!
Cap and Trade has the ear of politicians because it allegedly regulates green house gas emissions. Politicians are being "influenced" by lobbyists and others that have only self interests at heart.
In order for a Cap and Trade system to work correctly and actually reduce green house gases, first an agreement must be made on an engineering approach to calculation of green house gases, not on political agenda's.
Secondly the agreed upon protocol must be based on the accepted engineering practices and not merely financial transactions.
Third, standardized market reduction targets must be prioritized. A shot gun approach will fail; the energy efficiency world learned this lesson early on!
Lastly rewards and penalties must be regulated and not be open for political or private manipulation. To date self declaration and monitoring is the current practice for reporting. This self regulating mentality must change if reduction of green house gases is to take place.
The real winners under the current proposed Cap and Trade scenario will be the market manipulators and those that have a financial stake in this practice, not the environment and certainly not the economy. We will be paying considerable more for a program that produces little result, not to mention much higher rates at a time when the economy is in trouble.
yea they're building them in Utah and probably other places.
Posted by: Ron K on February 3, 2009 06:42 PMHowever, the rest of the population will get very tired of the silliness of the US (AGWarming/Cooling/whatever), zero-tolerance BS, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform", i.e. Amnesty, etc. once the economy is really in the tank. During Great Depressions, when many people have lost their homes, savings (even if were on paper), they lose their tolerance for silliness. That's when the shooting may start. I personally think the left-wing ought to back off now, but I don't see it happening.
Buy more Ammo, people. You can never have enough.
Posted by: Dave Lincoln on February 3, 2009 07:41 PMI take issue with you the above. CO2 is an odorless, colorless gas that is essential to all life forms in our planet. It is not a pollutant.
The objective of cap and trade (carbon tax) is to make the cost of fossil fuel energy and transportation so high that the public will be forced to favor other alternatives.
You appear to assume that use of fossil fuels still pollutes extensively. Not so. Most of the polluting emissions have been removed during fossil fuel combustion for electrical, industrial and transportation purposes. The Clean Air Act has been a genuine success. Our air quality is the best in the world. It would be even better, but for the foul air that comes to us from Asia and India.
Cap and trade will do nothing to improve air quality in Washington.
Posted by: Paddy on February 4, 2009 11:31 AMComrades!, explained President Mark Emmert. "Welcome to the University of Washington! ... This year all of our entering freshmen are expected to read (Kolbert's) Field Notes from a Catastrophe ..."! Then President Emmert took your money to buy Kolbert's book by the truckload for a campus where diversity runs a narrow gamut from far left to farther left.
But go to page 50 of Kolbert, and here's what you see: a graph that Weird Al Gore would love showing an armageddon spike in Greenland temperature, a spike that began with the Industrial Internal-Combustion SUV CO2 Revolution. In other words, the spike spikes 8000 years ago.
Much of what is known about the earth's climate over the last hundred thousand years comes from ice cores drilled in central Greenland ... Where once the (climate) system was thought to change, as it were, only glacially, now it is known to be capable of sudden and unpredictable reversals (such as the reversal that suddendly appeared) roughly 12,800 years ago. At that point the earth, which had been warming rapidly, was plunged back into ice age conditions. It remained frigid for twelve centuries and then warmed again, even more abruptly. In Greenland, average annual temperatures shot up by nearly twenty degrees in a single decade. ...
The record preserved in the Greenland ice sheet shows that our own relatively static experience of climate is actually what is exceptional. ... (A)verage temperatures in Greenland frequently shot up, or down, by ten degrees ... Nobody knows what caused the sudden climate shifts of the past ...
Yep, debates over, just like they say. Too bad science-hating conservatives don't get it, but UW does, thanks to your generosity.
(Text from pages 50, 51, and 56 of the special taxpaid propaganda edition of Field Notes. No violence was done to Kolbert's Catastrophe in the making of this polemic.)
Posted by: Gorebasm on February 4, 2009 05:13 PM