UPDATE: California Congressman Tom McClintock cites an example in our state where a similar bill has deepened California’s recession.
When I was a child in school, we all learned that the Depression was made more severe, if not caused, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. Over a thousand economists signed a petition asking president Hoover not to sign it. Yesterday, the Waxman-Markey bill passed the House by a seven vote margin. It is as destructive of the US economy as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was. Analysis is difficult because the bill has changed every day to accommodate lobbyists who offer support for a piece of the action. An analysis of its effect on the US economy is here by CATO Institute.
there is one policy nexus where congressional leaders are still doggedly determined to move the country left: energy and the environment. Speaker Pelosi will reportedly allow a vote on the controversial Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” legislation at the end of this week.
And it gets even better. Not content to tempt political fate by imposing huge carbon taxes on the American middle class, Democrats have added a provision which imposes stiff tariffs on our trading partners if they don’t adopt aggressive carbon restrictions of their own.
You heard correctly: progressives have authored a bill that earns the mortal enmity of domestic energy consumers and our most crucial trading partners at the same time. Economy-killing climate policies and a trade war — together at last!
The effect of the bill is a huge tax increase on the American public plus energy shortages for the rest of the century. The blather about “green jobs” is just that, blather.
And just for the sake of discussion, exactly how much global warming will be prevented by this assurance of future trade turmoil? Well, let’s use the federal government’s own model which — we are not making this up — is called MAGGIC (Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change). It comes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Let’s compare the effects of Waxman-Markey to the United Nations’ “business-as-usual” emissions scenario that’s in their big 2007 climate change compendium. If the U.S. only adopts Waxman-Markey, global warming would be reduced by a grand total of 0.2ºF by 2100. This is too small to even detect, because global temperatures bounce around by about this amount every year. For those who like to think more near-term, the amount of warming prevented by 2050 would be 0.07 of a degree.
According to the UN, without Waxman-Markey the warming from 1990 to 2050 would be 2.8ºF, and 5.3º by 2100. (Of course, observed warming since 1990 is running about 40 percent below the expected rate, largely because there hasn’t been any net warming since the very warm year of 1998.)
Now, let’s be completely unrealistic and assume that every nation that has “obligations” under the (failed) Kyoto Protocol cuts emissions as much as we do. Then the saved warming balloons all the way to 0.14ºF by 2050 and 0.4º by 2100, or 5 and 7 percent, respectively, of the “business-as-usual” total.
The legislation will wreck the US economy and start a trade war as Obama plans to raise tariffs on imports from countries that don’t adopt similar policies (China anyone ?). Fortunately, a wiser Congress can undo much of the damage as the Democrats have cleverly written the bill so none of the provisions, except the spending, take effect until after the 2012 elections.
The bill barely passed and would have been defeated except for eight Republicans. Their names are:
Bono Mack (CA)
Castle (DE)
Kirk (IL)
Lance (NJ)
LoBiondo (NJ)
McHugh (NY)
Reichert (WA)
Smith (NJ)
Without just 4 of these votes, the energy tax would have gone down and months of scheming by Henry Waxman and Speaker Pelosi would have been for naught. Two of them have hopes of a Senate run, I note. Twitter users are already calling them the #capntr8tors…
I think we can do without these people in the next Congress. If you want to understand just how ludicrous this act of Congress is, consider that there is no existing copy of the bill as passed. Not only didn’t they read it, it doesn’t exist. This is how banana republics are governed.