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June 30, 2009

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Cap and Trade: Another Hurdle for the Housing Market

by Bob Schwartz

Did you know The American Clean Energy and Security Act requires all homes sales to be conditioned upon an energy audit and an energy rating assessment/ labeling program.  

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a 1,200-page behemoth consisting of a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions, a federal renewable electricity mandate, and a suite of new mandatory energy efficiency standards, will impose 397 new federal regulations (which require traditional federal agency rule makings) and 1060 new mandates on an American public already overwhelmed by extensive federal regulation.

Congressmen Ron Paul, on 6-29-09 said:

The Cap and Trade Bill HR 2454 was voted on last Friday. Proponents claim this bill will help the environment, but what it really does is put another nail in the economy’s coffin. The idea is to establish a national level of carbon dioxide emissions, and sell pollution permits to industry as the Catholic Church used to sell indulgences to sinners. HR 2454 also gives federal bureaucrats new power to regulate a wide variety of household appliances, such as light bulbs and refrigerators, and further distorts the market by providing more of your tax money to auto companies.

Just like the TARP bill, this is all happening too fast. Anyone who thinks that Washington can craft a respectable bill in this short period of time is dreaming. The specifics of the bill aren’t being publicly discussed. The Democrats are trying to push this through so fast no one will know what hit them. The media is complicit in this. This is not the time to increase energy costs, either.

Kansas City Power & Light said the bill will force them to buy so many carbon allowances for coal that electricity rates could rise 50 percent by 2012, and another 70 percent by 2020.

Let’s get some positive economic growth first, not minus 6.6%, before we kick in some expensive program/tax.

Over 7,000 climate scientists have spoken out and signed a petition that states “climate change” is NOT caused by man, more than the number of scientists who wrote the UN charter on the topic.

This, along with the “stimulus” and “health care reform” is able to succeed to a degree because the American people are, for the most part, sheep who demand to be led, do not care to be involved in the process, do not care to know what is happening in their government, do not care to act on their own behalf and figure that Obama is more intelligent than they are. In fact he is leading them down the road to higher taxes, higher inflation and higher costs on all natural resources, all because of a false theory that curtailing carbon emissions can make a difference.

Kim Strassel, published in the (June 2009) Wall Street Journal:

“Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as ‘deniers.’ The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

“In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

“The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak ‘frankly’ of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming ‘the worst scientific scandal in history.’ Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

“The collapse of the ‘consensus’ has been driven by reality.”

Scientists – the ones without a political agenda – have shown that solar activity correlates with temperature changes. In fact, it correlates stronger to changes than CO2 does, and changes in CO2 levels FOLLOW changes in temperature by about 800 years. The only reason that CO2 and temperature would be increasing at the same time NOW is that temperature increased about 800 years ago. By the way, temperatures have been decreasing for a couple of years now.

Go ahead, be ignorant and say this is great. Believe that our government is saving us from disaster when they’re really creating one. What we should be doing is using nuclear power in the same way as France.

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2 Comments
  1. So how bad is it? I hear all these ramblings, fancy financial terms and so on. But what does it all really mean? Does the US collapse? Do we see soup lines and down trodden people like the experience was during the Great Depression? Seems to me the US financial catastrophe is pretty simple. Our government and the citizens of the US have consistently spent more than they take in. At some point the debt becomes so great we are unable to pay it back, or manage it. When we are no longer able to pay our debts what happens? Do we surrender assets, land and military hardware to the foreign nationals we’ve been burrowing money from over the last two decades? Maybe a fire sale of America? The whole system is a sham and we only have ourselves and those shysters in Wall Street and the Scum of Washington DC to blame..Sorry to say but, Obama won’t be able to save us from this SNAFU. The concept of uncontrolled spending and deficit through credit has finally caught up with us. This decade is perhaps a time for reckoning in which our short sighted ways and embrace of Wall Street’s psychopathic free market capitalism garnered by greed and unequaled corruption will finally get the best of us..

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  2. Dan
    Aug 18 2009

    I think you are being short sighted like almost all the other sheep you are refering too. Its easy to jump to the conclusion that greed and wall street are the problem. However, Wall Street’s psychopathic free market capitalists would get no further than our own pocket book if your elected officials wern’t selling them the protections they need to pull the stunts they do. Capitalists aren’t the Villians. The brokers of industry, our government, are the villains.

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