Sunday, February 22, 2009

Obama's Cap And Trade Energy Plan May Cost Over $1 Trillion and Up To 4 Million Jobs

How, exactly, does this improve the Obama Recession?

Cap and trade bills are nothing short of a government re-engineering of the American economy. With its aggressive targets to reduce emissions from fossil fuel use, it would put the nation on a path of serious economic harm not justified by any benefits.

The New York Times celebrates the plan as a victory for "climate change":

Full details of Mr. Obama’s budget for the 2010 fiscal year will be released in April. The outline on Thursday will make clear that he intends to push ahead on promises to contain health care costs and expand insurance coverage, and to move toward an energy cap-and-trade system for controlling emissions of gases blamed for climate change.

Department of Energy report on "cap and trade". Click to view (pdf).

Human Events reported on The Department Of Energy estimates for the severe economic cost of pandering to the far left radical climate change moonbats:

Dr. Winegarden notes that “Cap-and-trade has been such a dramatic failure in Europe, including forcing even “green” factories to fire workers. When asked whether America could learn enough from Europe’s mistakes that we could implement a cap-and-trade system that made sense; Winegarden’s answer was a resounding “no”. “Cap-and-trade is the politically expedient solution – it has great political merit but no economic merit. We’ll be revisiting this because, like Sarbanes-Oxley, it will create more problems than it will solve”, not least of which will be dramatically increased volatility of energy prices.

The potential costs to America from cap-and-trade policies are enormous. The Department of Energy estimates that S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal, will increase the cost of coal for power generation by between 161% and 413%. DOE estimates GDP losses (see chart) over the 21-year period they forecast, at between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion, with particular damage to the manufacturing sector. (This gives some hope that organized labor will, in a rare occurrence, oppose Democratic leaders on this issue.) Winegarden estimates that this bill could increase unemployment by 2.7% or about 4 million jobs. In fact, companies are already preparing to avoid increased level and volatility of American energy prices by setting up factories and partnerships in countries which won’t be subject to cap-and-trade restrictions…proving with real-world behavior of producers that no carbon-limiting regulation can succeed if it is not universal.

Read more:

Beware Of Obama's "Cap and Trade" Energy Plan

Proof That Obama's "Green Jobs" Plan Is A Joke That Will Hurt The Economy, Hurt The Environment

Obama forms green task force

California's 'Green Jobs' Experiment Isn't Going Well

Surprisingly, Huffington Post supports "Green Jobs"

Why Obama’s ‘Green Jobs’ Plan Won’t Work

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