Should Al Gore Win The Booby Prize This Year?

I wonder how many of you are aware of a looming burden being prepared by the liberal Democrats and their glorious leader for the U.S. economy. It’s called cap-and-trade which is devised to encourage development of alternative sources of energy by auctioning off permits to emit carbon dioxide, at a cost that is supposed to discourage the use of fossil fuels. These fuels currently generate over 80% of our energy. It’s called “climate revenue” and is predicted to generate more than $600 billion annually to the government coffers. This is really a tax on the private sector and they will view it as additional energy costs, thus reducing their gross margins. When your margins go down, you increase your prices and eventually it gets passed on to you and me.

President Obama’s energy proposals grossly underestimate the time to bring alternative fuels to compete with oil and gas on a commercial scale. As a matter of fact, his energy czar says we will need a lot more fossil fuel sources while we’re waiting and will probably have to spend $12 trillion until we get there. However, let’s leave this problem to our new czar of global warming, Mrs. Carol M. Browner, head of the FDA under Clinton. She is the new “coordinator of climate policies”, replacing God in that position. In order to take this job she left her position as a leader of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, a group that advocates global governance, which requires “rich” countries to shrink their economies to help fight global warming. In fact,after she was named to this position Mrs. Browner’s name quickly disappeared from the rolls of another one of her affiliations, Socialist International. Get the picture?

All of these gyrations based on the premise that we are at the precipice of a global catastrophe, global warming, when the inconvenient truth is that for the last few years we appear to be on the brink of an approaching ice age, according to a new study by Russian scientists. Can’t you tell by the fact that the last few global warming conferences have been delayed by ice and blizzards. You would think they would learn to schedule these in July.

Anyway, a cap-and-trade emission trading system has been operating in Europe for the past two years and has been a dismal failure. It has been an opportunity for political manipulation, bureaucracy, and worse. Causing volatile energy prices as permit prices soar when fuel prices rise and bust when they fall.

This is another ill-timed and poorly analyzed program that will reduce our global competitiveness and cost us billions. Why not encourage more drilling on the Continental Shelf and begin a thrust in nuclear energy, which will generate millions of jobs right away and put us on the road to energy independence? No, I guess that’s too easy! Let’s continue to make hybrid cars at higher prices, build windmills all over the country, and continue to generate ethanol from corn so that corn prices soar, at a cost that must be subsidized by the taxpayers in order to ever be competitive with hydrocarbon fuels. What a mess! We can thank Al Gore for all of this. No wonder he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He really is a “piece” of work.