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US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill
jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy. They might as well call it the "starve and freeze" bill.
People will still drive SUVs, they will just complain about the price. People will still have widescreen TVs, they will just complain about the cost of electricity. What Washington constantly fails to realize is that you can't legislate tastes, attitudes, and morality. If people want to consume energy, they will. You need a cultural shift, where people no longer feel the need to have huge cars, new TVs, etc etc and THEN you'll see energy usage go down.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Now, if only good intentions could justify the violation of individual rights, then they would have an argument.
The problem of too much cheap electricity is about to be solved.
Lets see, to get votes from Democrats in heavily affected states Pelosi will force upon us even more years and billions towards Ethanol. It is a 1200 page bill I doubt you will find if a small minority has read it all, let alone understands it. It will embed taxes while vilifying energy producers - the common theme of Washington - raising the cost of EVERYTHING.
The CBO report was hacked to make it look acceptable, real numbers by other groups put the cost from 1800 to 3000 per family.
I guess they have to rush to get their damage done in the two years they will have complete control. Honestly, once these timebombs start going off its going to flip the house and senate back. Maybe then we can have a real President and real Congress - ones so busy fighting each other that we get some protection from both.
As in, bring back a Republican majority in Congress and Democrat President who will fight them. Not this shit we have now where the President lets Congress run the ball and then claims credit for the touch down with the press dutifully cheering on the side lines with their pom poms.
Tax reform will never happen while government lives up the hidden power of embedded taxes.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why not call it what it is? A tax increase for the entire nation based on how much energy you use. The EPA finally released a censored study last night that pointed out how much the EPA has been ignoring the real science of the matter. The EPA's 'endangerment' study was completely politicized. One of the e-mails from a superior to the employee who had worked at the EPA for 35 years and wanted the study released: "The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision... I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." Look it up, you'll be disgusted as I am after hearing how many times people have said "The science is settled" to try and pass this extra tax.
This bill is so huge, Congress jokingly hired a speed reader to read through the bill after Republicans asked for it to be read aloud (giant waste of time to do in session). But honestly, if our Congressmen and women won't even read the bills they pass why the hell are they signing their names on them in the first place? There's undoubtedly so much pork in this bill it will cause problems above and beyond the things its addressing in the first place.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2009/05/speed_reader_brings_levity_to.html
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute. Cap and Trade.
The big question is, what is this Change going to do to the US economy?
While all of cap-and-trade appears very poorly thought out, Pres. Obama actually fully intended this to happen, as interviewed almost a year ago. So, hold on to your wallet, change is coming...
Insinuating Obama is more responsible than Bush for the state of today's economy is a particularly impressive piece of mental Judo.
Of course, we can't leave out all the folks who made impressive regulatory errors over the last 10 years, and all the businesses who operated dishonestly, folks from every nook and cranny of American politics.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
This will be the largest tax increase in United States history. The House Dems are rushing this bill through without even reading the bill. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html
Huh? Carbon isn't a profit center, it's a cost center: you pay for it. When you reduce the amount you emit, you make money. I've seen some pretty crazy arguments against this bill, but you're the first person to fundamentally misunderstand it. Congratulations.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
There isn't anything particularly crazy or stupid about using the cheapest available resource. Peak oil mongering is often based around the implied assumption that the decline will come in the form of a shock, requiring us to immediately replace all of the cheap oil in one fell swoop. Reality suggests that the price of oil will go up as it becomes more difficult to extract, leading to the gradual replacement of oil consumption over time (and each time someone comes up with a price viable replacement, it reduces the demand for the remaining oil, further smoothing out the transition).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Obama promised that taxes would not go up for 95% of Americans.
Congratulations. You are no longer an American, but a Citizen Of The World (tm).
Here's you new tax bill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Complete the following sentence: The USA needs 25% of the world's energy because...?
No sig today...
Sorry you're stupid enough to believe that mentioning fox is some kind of magic word that lets Obama off the hook.
Take a look at the scoreboard: he claims that he's entitled to violate the right of habeus corpus. He promised an end to the DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; what he actually delivered was a one-week hiatus. He has made no move to investigate (let alone prosecute) anyone for torturing prisoners. He's done precisely squat about his campaign promises regarding gay rights. He appointed a member of the Federal Reserve board of governors as the secretary of the treasury.
As for the economy, he's continued and compounded all of Bush's mistakes. Bush was a failure as a businessman; Obama never even attempted any endeavor where he had responsibility to investors, employees and customers.
Face it, the man is an empty suit. He's Mitt Romney with a better-sounding script in the teleprompter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A proposed amendment to the Cap and Trade Tax sought to provide a safety valve in case it goes horribly awry and trashes the economy. It stipulated that if gasoline reached $5 a gallon or unemployment hit 15%, the tax would go away. Sponsors of the bill basically argued that destroying the economy was not a bug but a feature, and rejected this.
If you think the current recession is bad, it's going to get a lot worse if this tax becomes law.
While I don't expect a Chomsky fan to have any reasoning abilities found outside of a college sophomore with a chip on his shoulder, I'll respond anyway for other readers.
Whether or not we have a 'right' to cheap energy is besides the point. The bill will be completely inneffective while gutting our economy.
1) China and Russia are laughing at us. This act will artificially drive up the price of cheap-carbon based fuel in the US, reducing US demand. Reduced US demand will lower the global price, making oil and coal MORE attractive options for the rest of the world. Their increased use will more than offset any possible reductions we could do, with this bill or any other.
2) Folks like you are willing to spend billions of dollars and eviscerate our economy on the trillion dollar scale in a futile and arrogant attempt to turn back the clock. None from your side has ever talked about how we would deal with increased global temperatures, how we might mitigate any rising sea levels, or what the potential upsides to global warming are.
(These first two points are valid regardless of whether or not you're a global warming believer)
3) The climate is always changing, even before we started emitting massive amounts of carbon or anything else. Go look up climate history and see that the best reconstructed information we have, in recorded human history and prior, shows the climate has been significantly warmer and significantly cooler than it is now.
The term 'global warming' lately has even been replaced with the term 'climate change.' This should tip off any prudent observer that it's all a blatant move to grab money and power. The climate is always changing, and as such, in the 'Climate Change' political environment, will always serve as a convienent excuse to expand taxes and the suffocating regulatory state.
The problem isn't carbon emissions, the problem is folks like you who think they're infinately wiser than their fellow man and the free market, and see no problem with grasping all the money and power they can in order to force their good intentions on the rest of us.
And don't you dare talk to me like I favor large smoke stacks bellowing thick black smoke over American cities, and dumping nasty chemicals into rivers. We solved those problems decades ago and I'm fine with that sort of regulation. Now we've got arrogant do-gooders on a mission with nothing good to do, and we'll all suffer for their hubris if not stopped.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
They sunk that low a long time ago. It's just that the people who should have been calling them on it were too caught up in their Bush-bashing frenzy to care. They were just happy that the media was so biased in their favor. It won't be long until we see the real fruits of a media that doesn't question authority, and instead revels in a sycophantic love fest with said authority.
The media should be questioning Cap and Trade, Health Care Reform, voter fraud, and yes, even presidential eligibility (if only for the purpose of laying the issue to rest) with the same zeal that they showed for mocking Bush every time he mispronounced a word. Mispronounced words don't ruin lives and economies, but these things just might. Where's the in-depth analysis? I don't see it -- for or against. Where's the investigation into winners and losers? We sure heard enough about "big oil" during the Bush years.
The Freedom of the Press was to safeguard their ability to question authority. What they're doing now is betraying that sacred trust and, in my opinion, endangering it by allowing the government to empower itself further and further without resistance or investigation. When the government decides that a free press is too dangerous to allow, the media will probably not have the influence necessary to fight it. They're already at record low levels in viewership because people just don't care about them anymore. Most people see their propaganda for what it is and are getting their news elsewhere -- from blogs if need be -- because at least those sources are genuine and up-front about their biases. The recent "infomercial" and White House-controlled media events are only a further indication of the future path of independent (non-government-run) media.
YES, real, unbiased reporting is just about dead, replaced by the new generation of pundit-reporters who thinks that it's their job to convince people rather than report the facts of the matter. I'm just waiting for these "reporters" to start crying that their business is dead, when it was them that held the pillow over its face.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
Complete the following sentence: The USA needs 25% of the world's energy because...?
...the GDP of the United States (13.84 trillion USD) is close to one-fourth of the world's GDP (54.62 trillion USD).
Get ready to see even more jobs being shipped south of the border if this is implemented. Simple economics
really, cheaper labor and now we add yet another reason not to produce anything in the US by increasing
energy prices.
Got Code?
Mass transit for passengers and cargo makes the most sense, but the powerful car lobby has lobbied against that for years. Where is all the high speed rail that would actually get people out of their cars? Instead of wasting money bailing out car companies why not use that same money to figure out ways to get us out of the need for owing a call all together?
You can also drive across the entirety of Britain on one tank of gas, because it's that fucking tiny and it's uniformly in a temperate zone that makes bicycling feasibly almost year-round.
Now try that in, say, Arizona during the month of July. I hope you allotted time to get a shower and change into your work clothes in the morning, and another to get home and do the same. Oh, wait, are we having a drought too?
Energy usage goes up based on where you live. Not everyone lives in shitty little teeny-tiny island nations that get a kick out of trying to out-socalist their neighbors.
The complaints against this bill have nothing to do with the spirit of it and everything to do with the structure of it. Taxes, any taxes, have distortionary economic effects. Some of these effects can be good, such as discouraging the use of carbon emitting fuels. Others are bad, such as making goods and services more expensive for consumers. Ideally, the government would enact a carbon tax and offset the tax by reducing personal income and corporate taxes proportionally. This leads to a marginal cost increase on burning fossil fuels without increasing the overall cost of goods and services to consumers and businesses.
But this is not what's happening. Instead of viewing this as an opportunity to enact beneficial legislation, our congressmen have instead opted to see it as an opportunity to increase government revenue. The pitfalls to the proposed system are numerous. As previously mentioned the first drawback is that consumers and businesses will immediately see prices on nearly all products go up. There has been discussion of granting permits to selected firms for free at the beginning. This is a fools bargain. See here for a detailed explanation why, but the net effect of such legislation is to essentially pass the proceeds from a carbon tax directly to the firms granted the permits. Not to mention that it opens up the entire system to immense potential for corruption, as permits will very likely be traded as political favors to campaign contributors, and it puts the government in the position of essentially selecting which companies to grant a massive competitive advantage to.
Yes carbon emissions and dwindling fossil fuels are serious problems, and we as a nation need to take steps to mitigate their effects. But this bill is quite possibly the worst was to do so. It incorporates nearly every unnecessary drawback to such legislation. It's a poorly written bill from top to bottom that accomplishes as little as possible. And it will pass, because the average American is too blinded by the promise of such a law to notice how absolutely terrible the details of it are, and any congressman who wants to be reelected would be a fool to vote against it.
First: the fundamental problem: We live in a global economy. This will absolutely increase the cost of domestically produced carbon-intensive goods relative to foreign produced carbon intensive goods from countries that are not affected by the program (unless we implement an import tariff to match the internal effective tax).
That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it is a fact which must be weighed when considering the program.
I still like the idea, though I would want the allotment (see below) to be high enough that it would be more of a gentle nudge than a baseball bat.
That's the problem, and my take, on the general concept. As for this specific embodiment, it is going to be a gigantic corruption engine, passing money from the biggest polluters to the most unscrupulous politicians, regulators, and lobbyists. But it can be solved, if you like the gentle nudge idea (or even if you like the baseball bat idea).
The first step in a cap-and-trade program sets a limit on the amount of gases that can be released into the atmosphere. That is the cap. Companies with facilities that are covered by the cap will then receive permits for their share of the pollution, an annual pollution allowance. This bill initially would give the bulk of the permits away for free to help ease costs, but they still would have value because there would be a limited supply.
So, what portion of those initial free credits do I get? Who decides how much each company gets? Is it based on industry? Revenue? Profit? Market cap? Campaign contributions?
My guess is that this is going to be another gigantic paean to incumbents and the big shaft for startups.
Here's my proposal:
Every U.S. voting citizen gets an equal share, to do with as they please, apportioned annually. Corps don't get any -- they have to buy them from citizens. Give yours to your employer, sell it, sit on it, whatever. After all, this is a public good that is up for sale, right? What possible fair system could be established for the government picking which corps to give them to?
To keep the prices reasonable at first, start with massive over-subscription. Allot 1,000,000x what we're producing now. That should solve the problems of the initial market not existing. Then just lower the rate by 10x per year until we get to the desired level. But don't just hand these things out to the biggest incumbents and screw new business.
Note that this approach would achieve exactly the objective:
People who want to "be green" can sit on their credits, and forgo the money.
People who consume less carbon-intensive products would pay less of the "passed on" cost from companies that have to buy lots of credits.
People who are willing to pay for carbon intensive goods can, and the glorious free market hands that money to people who make sacrifices to reduce carbon consumption.
Adjusting the annual allotment naturally adjusts the price.
No single person, whether CEO, laborer, politician, lobbyist, or EPA regulator, gets any disproportionate share of the public good.
Companies that cut carbon emissions can put their products on the market at a lower price.
The solution as proposed only achieves the last piece, and that only in an extraordinarily corruption-sensitive way.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
True. But people do have a choice in where they choose to live. and choosing to live a commute from work in a hot region has consequences. And when we as a society decide that individuals must PAY THE COST OF THEIR OWN CHOICES... as we would with appropriate energy costs that take into account external costs we have gotten used to being shielded from... then people will have to deal with those consequences.
it sucks for the first people who have to change... such as me, who stupidly bought a house a half hour from my office and can't sell it, so I must commute as I don't have time for 3 hours of biking a day, minimum... but hey, thems the breaks. We also had the benefit of stupidly cheap energy for a long time, which is more than anyone coming after us will be able to say.
This is an optional tax. We can use less energy. We may not be able to do it with 70 degree thermostats year round, 30 MPG cars if we're lucky, and without planning our trips to the store a little better, but it can be done. This removes our ability to ignore the consequence of our actions. Nothing more.
Creating bills to reduce consumption have a higher impact the lower your wages are. If 10% of a person's income is spent on gasoline, and gas goes up 100%, then they are affected more than someone whose fuel costs are 1% of their income. It's a hidden 'tax' by the government that will impact lower income people far more than higher income people. When gas rose to $4/gallon and my monthly gas bill increased by $200/month, I was able to absorb the increased cost by reducing what I saved WITHOUT having to reduce my consumption. People who don't save and are living paycheck to paycheck either have to drive less or give up something in their already tapped out expenses.
And since this will impact EVERYTHING, including necessities like food and heating/cooling costs, that will drive down the ability for lower income people to purchase things like cars, movie tickets, etc., further forcing the economy down into a hell hole just so Congress can get some slush funds.
Notice how now one has specified yet that the MONEY resulting from this bill has no dedicated purpose?? Congress will be free to direct it wherever they want. And the only jobs created will be those like Wall Street brokers, buying and selling no product and contributing nothing to the GDP. (This isn't a slam on Wall Street brokers, but moving money from one place to another doesn't improve the economy, creating a real product does.) It's like trying to fill up a pool by taking water from the deep end and pouring it in the shallow end.
The good news is that in two to four years of this, the country can revolt, kick all the Democrats out, and we can then repeal the bill before too much damage is done.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Come to a state like AR. Here there is zero public transport, the average work commute is about 50+ miles each way(because you can't afford to live in the cities except for the "welcome to the jungle" section) and there simply isn't any other way. What are we supposed to do, walk 100 miles a day? Ride buses that don't actually exist?
All this crap is cooked up by elitist east and west coast dwellers where there is plenty of public transport like subways and buses. But it will totally kill life in the south, and we are hurting enough already. So say goodbye to all the goods and services you got coming from south of the Mason/Dixon line. Because if crap like this passes our unemployment will shoot through the roof as folks get fired because they simply can't afford to come to work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
insightful? maybe after you get your facts right:
You're confusing "Britain" with "The Netherlands" here:
Britain is
~800 miles long and up to 500 miles wide or so
has hills all over the place, cycling considered to be a sport anywhere outside major towns
climate varying from subtropical (palm trees) to near-arctic
larger than California
has twice as much inhabitants as California
average person uses 5218.2W of energy[1]
The Netherlands is
~200 miles long and wide
flat as your mum's chest (there's only 2 significant hills), cycling main mode of transportation
a climate so moderate and predictable you can guarantee ride your bicycle every day and get wet.
about the size of New Jersey
has about 40% the inhabitants compared to California, or 20% compared to Britain.
average person uses 6675.2W of energy[1]
So, to get to your point: WRONG
The UK is a lot _larger_ and has major geological obstacles (hills, rocks, climate variation) that make it harder to use less energy than the netherlands. However the British use 15-20% _less_ energy per inhabitant than the postage sized dutch who live in a fricken flat country where laying a pipe or road or canal is trivial due to the soft soil, flatness and year-round beneficial climate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita