US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill 874
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.
Link to AP FAQ (Score:3, Informative)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090626/ap_on_bi_ge/us_climate_q_a [yahoo.com]
I couldn't get the link to work in the main story so here it is via Yahoo!.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:5, Informative)
You're right. This bill should really be called "A Tax Increase For All Americans." The estimated tax revenue the government expects to extract from the population from the passage of this bill is huge.
Tax & Kill (Score:2, Informative)
It won't push people into smaller cars. Americans spend too much time in our cars to drive around in a micro car. Not all of us live in big cities with public transportation and easy access to stores. The Smart Fortwo couldn't even fit a one week load of groceries for the average American family. We have states that are larger than entire countries in other parts of the world - what works for them doesn't work for us.
All of this for reducing Carbon Dioxide - which is not proven to be a pollutant, and for reducing global warming - even when there is no proof that human activities are impacting climate.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:4, Informative)
You're right. This bill should really be called "A Tax Increase For All Americans." The estimated tax revenue the government expects to extract from the population from the passage of this bill is huge.
The Wall Street Journal [wsj.com] would certainly agree with you.
Britain did something similar, and the average family is paying an extra $1,300 (USD) in taxes per year.
Horrible Idea (Score:2, Informative)
Cap and Tax (Score:3, Informative)
A capitalistic solution (Score:1, Informative)
Cap and Tax is a very good idea. The major issue with emissions is that it's a tragedy of the commons game on a global scale. And there are really only two ways to try to handle the problem if you want to see a real change in the emissions, as there are strong economic reasons to increase them:
1: You create specific laws, limiting specific types of emissions. Typical example is a maximum emission limit on cars or making SUV's illegal.
2: You place a tax on emissions themselves, then let the market sort out where it makes most economic sense to limit the emissions. If your car emits 3 times as much as other cars you get to pay for it, but the government doesn't tell you you can't own the car.
For some reason there seems to be a strong resistance against letting the market sort out where to save the money. I guess it's because it's more visible than having the car producers spend more money engineering how the car works. And just spewing out the waste is always going to be more expensive than limiting it to sane levels or even taking care of it.
I wonder how many here consider it a good idea to dump As, Pb and Hg in the local rivers to enhance the industrial productivity... After all, not having to take care of heavy metals is one of the large advantages the Chinese industry (traditionally) has over the American. And it saves them billions each year...
Re:No real impact (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. Energy taxes are about as regressive as they come. Of course, I don't think it's a stretch to predict that this will be offset with an "tax credit" (read: subsidy) for low income workers.
Economic suicide (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:2, Informative)
1/4 of energy for 1/4 of GDP (Score:5, Informative)
Complete the following sentence: The USA needs 25% of the world's energy because...?
...the GDP of the United States (13.84 trillion USD) [google.com] is close to one-fourth of the world's GDP (54.62 trillion USD) [google.com].
Re:....the "starve and freeze" bill. (Score:1, Informative)
Because this 5% of the earths population works as hard as 25% of the earth and can afford to pay for 25% of the worlds energy at the current market price. Remember we don't steal that energy we pay for it and put it to good use.
Re:....the "starve and freeze" bill. (Score:1, Informative)
because the USA still wears the Daddy pants in this world or maybe because we produce +25% of everything cool in the world ?
Re:....the "starve and freeze" bill. (Score:1, Informative)
There is nothing insightful about that statement. After living in the UK and traveling around Europe for the last three years I've come to the conclusion that they are no different than Americans when it comes consumption.
Considering that most of Europe and especially the UK has very mild weather compared to the US (no ac needed and even less heat) and that the distances needed to travel between towns is a quarter of what it is in the States, it doesn't give them any moral higher ground to stand on. A day of driving in the UK and you can get from one end to the other or half way accross Europe. A day of driving in the US will only get you across a few states.
The weather, the outrageously high taxes, and the willingness (aka lack of choice, house prices are 2-3 times than in the states) to live elbow to elbow keeps Europes consumption levels down, but they still build shity uninsulated homes, they still pack into their small cars and clog the motorways on bank holiday weekends (3-day), they pave over anything, that doesn't already have houses on it, is a farm, or part of some rich asshole's estate (in other words there next to no wild areas left), and still buy the biggest TV's that will fit in their 800 square foot houses with is what is left over of their pay check after paying for $8 a gallon gas.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a better chart [globalwarmingart.com]
Does it strike you as interesting that human civilization and culture flourished during the prolonged stability of the last 10k years or so?
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:5, Informative)
I certainly hope it works but I'm wondering how its going to save the worlds climate if China continues to expand its use of coal to generate electricity faster than the entire rest of the world can reduce their output of CO2. Likewise how is it really going to solve our climate problem if, as American's switch to fuel efficient cars, India and China drive to put their billions of people IN TO cars and create cities with clogged freeways in their drive to emulate American stupidity.
If the U.S. and Europe had done this 40-50 years the benefits would have been huge. At this point the U.S. and Western Europe are mostly just cutting back to allow China and India to assume their rightful role, due to their overpopulation, as consumers of most of the world's fossil fuels and producers of most of its pollution.
Cap and trade really only solves our climate problem if they whole world does is. So far China in particular is refusing because they say they are a developing economy and they have the right to pollute and squander energy the same way the U.S. and Europe did during their industrial revolution. They view it as unfair for the west to have gotten away with polluting to build their wealth and now telling them they can't just as they are building their own.
I recall reading an article on cap and trade in Europe, I think in the NY times some time ago. It pointed out that some of its "success" was because many industries, that were major producers of CO2, and which would be hammered by the caps, just moved off shore to Africa, China or anyplace but the EU. In probably resulted in those factories polluting more since they weren't under any pollution constraints at all once they left the EU.
Unfortunately much the same thing will happen in the U.S. for any manufacturing industry that is CO2 heavy. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing to China and India where there are NO pollution controls worth mentioning, energy is cheap due to most of it coming from coal, and labor is cheap too. China is trying to build more nuclear and hydro in their defense, and they know they have a problem. But they also HAVE to grow their economy 7-8% a year just to keep their growing population employed. Chances are they will do a major expansion in clean energy AND continue a dramatic expansion in burning coal.
The only solution to the China problem is you have to place tariffs on Chinese exports to inflict the cap and trade on them against their will and then you get in to a global trade war.
Cap and trade is likely to really only work in the U.S. on captive CO2 producers who can't flee to escape the tax, like coal fired power plants, driving and airlines. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing and maybe even data centers to places without cap and trade and with cheaper electricity. Only manufacturing that will stay in this country is the manufacturing being government subsidized like our car companies lately.
I appreciate the value of cap and trade in punishing coal fired power plants. They are a horror. But unless this country actually starts a Manhattan project to develop an energy source that is cheap, clean, abundant and renewable, cap and trade is going to have negative economic consequences. If the U.S. could, for example, accelerate the ignition facility and get us workable fusion power SOON that would be a boon to our economy. I fear its blind optimism to think that making "green energy" competitive by making everything else more expensive wont hammer our economy. We started using coal and oil for energy precisely because you need the cheapest possible energy to drive an industrialized economy. The more expensive your energy source is the more of a drag it is on your economy.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:National Energy Tax (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:3, Informative)
And then the savvy businessman decided to move his profits into an off-shore tax haven [wikipedia.org]. Meanwhile, the local infrastructure that savvy businessman used goes unsupported and the country rots from within. Globalism distorts your simplistic model.
That may be true, but unless he moved himself offshore, his money is still spent locally. Where the money "sits" is irrelevant. It's where it is spent that matters.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:4, Informative)
Too late. Clinton managed to halt the growth of the debt, even sandwiched between two borrow-and-spend presidents. However, doing that again, with the additional debt Bush added would be nearly impossible. We'd need both sides to make concessions, and not the "concessions" where they aren't giving up their own pet projects, but instead letting the other guy spend more on his. Cut military in half. Cut health care spending in half (and I think that could be done without decreasing care at all, so that isn't a call to decrease coverage, but change the system so that costs and coverage are the primary concerns, not protecting the health care and insurance industries and AMA). Index SS (if it was indexed at the beginning, then we'd not be having any problems, but with people living longer, retiring later and such, the numbers don't work out). Pay back at least 5% of the debt per year (not 5% of the previous year each year, but to make the debt 0 in 20 years).
That's a simple plan. That plan would work. However, the Republicans would be against it because it cut military. The Democrats would be against it because it would appear to cut welfare. Pork is nothing in our budget, it's a billion here and a billion here in a multi-trillion dollar budget. If all the pork was cut, we still couldn't balance the budget, let alone start paying off the massive and debilitating debt. If the debt was gone now, our tax bill would be 25% less. Wouldn't you like a 25% decrease in taxes? If they cut spending enough to make my plan work, once the debt was paid off, taxes would be nearly half what they are now. Wouldn't you like lower taxes? Then make your politicians cut spending and pay back the debt.
I gave up. I'm leaving the country. The ship is sinking, and I'm the rat leaving the millions of captains to go down with it. Not that the global economy will do great when the US implodes, but that it will be better than being here. I'll come back in 30 years when everything recovers and it's the best country in the world again. At this point, the sooner it blows up, the sooner the US will be fixed. So I'm morbidly cheering for all plans that spend money without increasing taxes. That's one step closer to insolvency.
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:3, Informative)
"and the ozone hole is actually not nearly as bad as we imagined when we started banning things"
Uhm. No, it's as bad as was predicted (http://vort.org/2009/05/14/world-avoided/). And banning CFCs in cooling systems was also necessary.
The sky is not falling (Score:3, Informative)
I'd like to invite you folks to RTFA from the Huffington Post. (Emphasis mine)
Re:The sky is not falling (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score:1, Informative)
Your post makes more baseless assertions than I can readily count, and on top of that you seem to consider "carbon sequestration" a source of energy. You have mixed a few valid points, such as the fact that cheap energy will require new energy sources, with unsupported assertions like "we'll get a lot of our energy from green sources". You seem to be attempting to conflate the issues of cheap/abundant/redundant energy and green energy. This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but these are actually totally separate issues. This is further complicated by the fact that "green" is so hard to define. You listed "nuclear" right in there with wind, solar, and algae. While I personally am a big fan of nuclear power, most "green" types are decidedly not. The biggest proponents of cap-and-trade are almost without exception also the biggest opponents of nuclear power.
For clarification, "carbon sequestration" is not a source of energy. On the contrary, sequestration activities typically consume energy, even if all you're doing is planting trees. You seem to think that sequestering carbon will solve energy problems, but by definition it will create them rather than eliminate them. The logical discussion here is whether or not it is worth it to exacerbate some of our energy availability problems (at least in the short term) in order to avert an alleged ecological disaster. The only cogent points in such a discussion relate to:
Actually, if cap and trade were applied logically and fairly (which it won't be, under this or any other bill Congress will ever pass), it would most benefit the logging industry and would lead to very cheap lumber. You see, it turns out that logging and building stuff out of lumber is just about the most carbon-negative activity anyone has ever come up with. You see, old growth trees no longer sequester much carbon as they near the limit of their growth. The best time for carbon sequestration is during the younger years of the tree as it is growing rapidly. Furthermore, if the tree falls over and rots, it will release the majority of that carbon back into the atmosphere as it rots. The best option is to cut it down and build a house out of it, where that carbon will be sequestered in somebody's McMansion for the next hundred+ years before it is torn down and the lumber is sent to the recycling plant where it will be turned into paper for printing discounted copies of "Earth in the Balance" just in time for the Global Cooling crisis predicted back in the 70's to finally arrive and freeze Death Valley.
Since what the logging industy does is constantly clear out old growth and plant new trees while ensuring that carbon sequestered in wood mass stays that way, you would think it would be the world's most carbon-negative industry. If carbon offsets were actually certified fairly, the logging industry could literally give away their lumber and still turn a profit under cap-and-trade. Furthermore, if the environmentalist types were logical, fair-minded, and actually serious about reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, they would embrace the logging industry as their best friend. Instead they lobby for provisions in carbon-credit certification processes to exclude the logging industry from elligibilty for certification. Why? Because they love trees. People who chop them down are just evil, bad men.
It's a religion, folks... whic
Mass transit only works ... (Score:3, Informative)
Mass transit for passengers and cargo makes the most sense, ...
Mass transit only makes sense when you have masses of people concentrated in one place to be transported to another concentrated place. It potentially works in dense and/or inner cities (and boo on the companies that sabotaged it). But it's not a panacea.
Of course with the Obama administration's admiration of plans to demolish thin parts of cities and pack the people into a dense core where "services may be more effectively delivered", as was proposed for Flint MI, you might have more of that situation in the future.
But for suburbs, rural areas, or the wide-open spaces, forget it. Figure that anywhere that doesn't have fiber to the curb by now (and a lot of places that do) will be situated so that private cars will always be a better deal, energetically and financially, than mass transit.
Where is all the high speed rail that would actually get people out of their cars?
Places with such dense population concentrations, such as Japan.
Remember that the US is spread out over most of a CONTINENT. We have counties larger than some European countries, and large areas where the gas stations are more than 100 miles apart and the nearest sheriff might be a day's drive away IF weather is permitting.
(Beware the "all states are the same size" phenomenon of all MAPS being sized to be held but scaled so the mapped area fits. This leads to things like the Japanese executives, when they couldn't get a flight into Detroit Metro to go to a meeting, noticing that O'Hare was "right next to it" and flying there - then being surprised when it took all day to drive to detroit. Or Chrysler closing so many dealers in the larger western states that you have to take your car over 300 miles to get dealer service.)
Re:Gas (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
He wasn't lying (Score:3, Informative)
Cap and trade will not increase my taxes, it will increase the prices of energy I buy.
Obama is and was playing to his base, who share two attributes--they don't like big corporations and they have a poor grasp of macroeconomics.
You and I know that there is no practical difference in my first sentence--either way I'm paying more money. But there are a lot of people who think we can raise taxes on big companies and the money will just come from "somewhere" to pay them. The rest of us know that higher corporate taxes are passed right on to the consumer as higher prices.
Of course things can be just as bad on the other side, where some people seem to think that all of climate science is a conspiracy led by Al Gore.