In reality, this cap-and-trade plan is nothing more than a hidden tax that The Heritage Foundation has estimated could increase the average American family’s energy bill by $1,500 annually!
Introduced by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the so-called Waxman-Markey bill will place a severe regulatory burden on American businesses, which will increase their costs and reduce their competitiveness, hurting our nation’s economy.
These higher operating costs for utilities, oil companies, and industry will ultimately trickle down to individual Americans, and you and I will pay an estimated 74 percent more for gasoline, 90 percent more for electricity, and 55 percent more on our natural gas bills. And that’s not the end of it. We’ll also pay more for every product that requires fossil fuels in its manufacture or transportation!
The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade plan will also grow the size and cost of government by requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a greenhouse gas (GHG) registry, create a GHG emission allowance transfer system, and set emission allowances from 2012-2050. This army of new bureaucrats will eventually control every aspect of industrial, commercial, and individual energy use. What’s more, the cap-and-trade program will necessarily be ripe for political favoritism and corruption, as politicians and bureaucrats manipulate the system for favored industries.
Friend, climatologist Chip Knappenberger has estimated that the 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions mandated under Waxman-Markey by 2050 will result in a drop in climate temperature of only nine-hundredths of 1 degree Fahrenheit. That’s equivalent to just two years of avoided global warming.
In short, the Waxman-Markey bill will achieve virtually no environmental pay-offs, while imposing huge costs on our businesses, our economy, and each and every one of us as a taxpayer and consumer.
Related Reading:
Citation Details
Title: 'The impacts of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 on U.S. Agriculture'.
Author: Unavailable
Publication: Pro Farmer (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 2, 2010
Publisher: Farm Journal Media
Volume: 38 Issue: 1 Page: 3(1)
Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning
