A Very Bad Idea
Oct 12, 2009 Political
Even as the focus is on healthcare, the climate bill, known as Cap and Tax, is sneaking through Congress, with even some RINOS like Lindsey Graham undergoing a pod- like body snatcher transformation, as he signs on to the flawed and expensive legislation-previously he had been against it. And he was right to have been against it- it is a very bad bill.
It does nothing but allow the government to take over a good portion of everyone’s lives, and will cost jobs- it will cost a lot of jobs, including union jobs.
Nestled in Ohio’s Amish country, Bill Belden’s 124-year-old family owned brick company has thrived on the region’s rich red clay and shale, and cheap energy from abundant coal.
Which he’s convinced that a climate bill being considered in Congress will end.
A cap-and-trade system forcing businesses away from fossil fuels, especially coal, will mean higher electricity and natural gas costs, he says. And layoffs at the Belden Brick Co.
“We’re already under severe economic strain,” said Belden, standing beside towering stacks of fresh bricks outside one of the six plants that ring Sugarcreek.
The town, about 80 miles south of Cleveland, calls itself “the Little Switzerland of Ohio.” Signs dot the highway hailing the annual Swiss Festival, quaint bed and breakfasts, and restaurants that feature traditional Dutch Amish cooking.
It’s brick, however, that’s Sugarcreek’s economic foundation.
A lifelong Republican, Belden said his criticism of the Democratic-run Congress over global warming isn’t about politics, but economics. “We’ve got to compete in the world and to do so we need low cost energy,” he argues.
kansascity.com
Of course it isn’t about politics- until the liberals make it so, by making it much harder to keep costs down- cheap energy is what is needed right now- our economy demands it.
It’s a 30-minute drive up Interstate 77 from Belden’s plants to the United Steelworkers Union office just outside Canton. Former steelworker Joe Holcomb, now a district representative for the union, says that a dozen years ago the union had 65,000 members in the state. It’s now about 50,000.
Like Brown, Holcomb and union members see the climate bill debate in Washington as a path to new manufacturing jobs and way to push those numbers up again – or at least stem the slide. That’s why the national union strongly backs the cap-and-trade legislation.
If energy prices jump, Holcomb says he’ll put up a windmill and generate his own power.
But he’s not exactly a tree-hugging environmentalist. He recalls the push decades ago to clean up Ohio’s rivers and sooty air from factory smokestacks. The water became cleaner, the air healthier, but factories closed, production became more expensive, jobs were lost, he said.
His warning to those in Washington: Don’t make the same mistake.
“If we’re just going to put a bill in and say we’re going to clean the air … but not create jobs, we’ve already seen that happen. We’ve got to do it in a way that’s going to bring jobs into this country and not let them go out of here.”
Many of the union’s members work across town, producing specialty steel at a mill owned by the Timken Co., a $5.6 billion global manufacturer of high-grade precision bearings for everything from cars and locomotives to jetliners and giant wind turbines. Of its 25,000 employees worldwide, about 5,000 are in Ohio.
It’s electricity bill for the steel mill and five other Ohio facilities runs as much as $50 million a year.
Ward “Tim” Timken Jr., company’s chairman, said the United States has no business capping carbon pollution and fossil fuel use unless other countries act as well.
“This whole notion that the U.S. is going to lead and set the example because it’s the moral thing to do is foolish,” he said in an interview at the company’s technology center adjacent to the Akron-Canton airport.
Timken, a member of one of Ohio’s most influential Republican families, said he doesn’t understand why the steelworkers would support the climate bill.
“These guys have to wake up and realize that their jobs are stake,” he said.
If the bill became law, “there would be some very difficult decisions to be made, quite frankly. I’ve got a global footprint. A quarter of my work force is in Asia. I’ve got manufacturing in Eastern Europe,” he said. “These are very real threats that we’re talking about.”
kansascity.com
The liberals continue to mistakenly believe that the jobs we shed will magically be reinvented, and perhaps that might be true in a long run (if you believe in unicorns), but we would see a depression the likes of which we have never seen, because, unless other countries signed onto the same restrictions we impose on ourselves, this bill will have the only true effect of impoverishing our country unnecessarily. And all in the mistaken myth of “Global Warming”- a myth that has no basis in reality, just in the minds of liberals who want to impose their beliefs on everyone else.
Quid enim est veritas? What, then, is the truth? The single question whose answer gives us the truth about the climate question is this: By how much will any given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration warm the world? We now know the answer. The oceans, which must store 80-90% of all heat-energy accumulated in the atmosphere as a result of the radiative imbalance caused by greater greenhouse-gas concentration, have shown no net accumulation of heat for almost 70 years, implying a very small influence of CO2 on temperature (Douglass & Knox, 2009). The devastating analysis of cloud-albedo effects shortly to be published by Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville will show that the UN has wrongly decided that cloud changes reinforce greenhouse warming, when in fact they substantially offset it. Repeated studies of the tropical upper troposphere (e.g. Douglass et al., 2008) show that it is failing to warm at thrice the surface rate as required by all of the UN’s models, again implying very low climate sensitivity. The clincher is Professor Richard Lindzen’s meticulous recent paper demonstrating – by direct measurement – that the amount of radiation escaping from the Earth’s atmosphere to space is many times greater than the UN’s models are all told to believe. From this, the world’s most formidable atmospheric physicist has calculated that a doubling of CO2 concentration, expected over the next 150 years, would cause 0.75 C (1.5 F) of warming, at most: not the 3.4 C (6 F) that the UN takes as its central estimate.
Most analysts would stop there. Yet some might ask, “Suppose that the single satellite on which Lindzen’s results depend is defective. What then?” They might consider the economic cost of attempting to mitigate the “global warming” which, as our Monthly Reports demonstrate, is not actually happening. The figures turn out to be startlingly simple. To mitigate just 1 C (2 F) of warming, one must forego the emission of 2 trillion tons of CO2. The world emits just 30 billion tons a year. So the analyst, as a thought-experiment, would shut down the entire world economy, emitting no CO2 at all. Even then, and even on the incorrect assumption that the UN’s exaggerated projections of the effect of CO2 on temperature are correct, it would take 67 years to mitigate 1 C warming. Preventing the 3.4 C (6 F) warming that the UN’s climate panel thinks would occur in 100 years would take 225 years without any transportation, and with practically no electrical energy. The national security advisor would at that point advise his head of government that there has never been any security threat less grave, or more expensive to prevent, than the non-problem that is “global warming”. It is the fearmongers that are the real national security threat.
americanthinker.com
Yes, it is the fearmongers, because these people want your money, and more importantly, they want you to live as they think you should- they do not trust you to be able to live as you yourself wish to. This is contrary to the American Dream, where you as an individual are able to chart your own course. A denial of freedom of choice- but this does not bother these control freaks at all; no, they want the power to dictate what you do and how you do it.
Their whole policy is based on a lie, a very big lie.
And that is always a very bad idea.
[tip]If you enjoy what you read consider signing up to receive email notification of new posts. There are several options in the sidebar and I am sure you can find one that suits you. If you prefer, consider adding this site to your favorite feed reader. If you receive emails and wish to stop them follow the instructions included in the email.[/tip]
Tags: al gore, climate, depression, job loss, liberal lies