You probably noticed the breathless recent news stories (like this one from the AP) about the Obama administration’s latest report on climate change and wondered what has changed, especially since, as AP reporter Seth Borenstein noted that “The document … contains no new research, but it paints a
fuller and darker picture of global warming in the United States than
previous studies.”
What’s new is that the environmental community needs to scare lawmakers and the public as much as possible in hopes that they can shove the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill through Congress before the opposition gets organized.
Say you’re really convinced that the United States needs to do something now to curb greenhouse gases. Well, based on this post from Jim Manzi in The Corner (read the post and follow the links), you should consider Waxman-Markey a disaster.
As Manzi says,
The legislative strategy appears to be to cut whatever side deals are necessary to get the swing Democrats to support it. This mostly has meant giving away special allowances and spending programs to pretty much every industry or region that actually produces greenhouses gasses at sufficient scale to play the lobbying game.
There does not seem to be any line in the sand that they will not cross. At this point, the side deals seem to have consumed the cap. That is, when you look under the hood, there is not really a material binding cap in this bill for at least a decade.
In fact, the bill would allow industries to increase greenhouse gas emissions until 2020 or later without penalty.
Moreover, the really scary White House report appears to rely on science about as sound as voodoo, according to Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental science professor at the University of Colorado.
[Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the ?most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive? analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of uncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?
(Hat tip: the NYT’s John Tierney.)
The goal appears to be to get some mechanism in place to some day tax the you-know-what out of energy-intensive industries even it does nothing to deal with the “imminent crisis” the Al Gore crowd won”t shut up about.
