EDITORIAL: Give the cold shoulder to climate bill

Cap-and trade is a huge energy tax increase unlikely to have any effect on global climate.

After narrow approval in the House, the so-called cap-and-trade bill to curb global warming deserves to die in the U.S. Senate.

The Waxman-Markey legislation is a huge energy tax in a thin disguise, designed to force Americans to switch to more expensive renewable energy sources.

Despite its goal to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there’s scant reason to believe its harsh economic penalties will affect global climate at all.

The bill would regulate everything from light bulbs to cement manufacturing and progressively restrict annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Companies emitting less than their allotted tonnage could sell their excess government-issued permits to companies exceeding their limits. The convoluted scheme is backed by environmental zealots, big-government statists and favor-seeking businesses.

The environmental lobby is motivated by antagonism toward conventional economic development as much as by misplaced yearnings for a green utopia. Governmental would-be controllers see regulation of carbon dioxide as the perfect excuse to intrude into virtually every human activity because nearly everything man does emits CO2.

Many industrial interests joined the cause because they see government control as inevitable. They prefer to be at the table rather than on the menu, participating in the rule-making to influence government’s distortions of the free market to their benefit.

It’s a formidable convergence of zealots, control-seekers and private interests hoping to receive a transfer of wealth from less-favored sectors of the economy with government’s help.

Fortunately, the drawbacks are great enough to stir opposition among sectors that stand to lose. We hope those countervailing interests prevail.

Proponents claim Waxman-Markey will cost a U.S. household only $140 a year to start. But the Heritage Foundation calculates that as soon as the bill takes effect in 2012 a family of four’s annual total costs will be $2,979. Resulting job losses, particularly in manufacturing, will average 1,145,000 a year from 2012-35.

The bill assumes man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerously high temperatures. But when a senior EPA research analyst recently authored a study disputing that assumption, the agency suppressed his report.

Analyst Alan Carlin concluded in his report that the U.S. shouldn’t form global warming policy based on findings of the frequently criticized United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Increasingly, scientists challenge the IPCC’s conclusions, pointing out that temperatures have flatlined, if not declined, for more than a decade even though CO2 emissions skyrocketed. In the face of this mounting criticism, President Barack Obama now frames the

legislation as an economic stimulus. “Make no mistake,” he said last week, “this is a jobs bill.”

But claims about new “green jobs” are doubtful. A study in Spain found for every green job created by government funding, 2.2 regular jobs are lost, and only one in 10 green jobs are permanent.

A European trade union study recently found that four existing jobs will be eliminated for each new solar- and wind-power job created, and the new jobs would “mainly be for young people.”

The Senate should kill this onerous bill, as it did similar cap-and-trade attempts in 2003, 2005 and 2008.

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