Waxman's Lunch | cooler heads

The House Democratic Caucus voted yesterday to replace Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. This should provide a loud wake-up call to American business leaders that the 111th Congress is not going to play nicely with them on energy rationing policies. I hope that those who have counseled that “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” will now realize that they are on the menu and they’d better get as far away from the table as quickly as they can. The cap-and-trade bill that Chairman Dingell proposed this fall would dramatically raise energy prices for American consumers and producers. Chairman Waxman, who represents Beverly Hills, introduced a cap-and-trade bill in this Congress that would send us back to the Stone Age.

Welcome to the American prison

What about average citizens? They'd get nailed too, being forced to pay much higher utility rates because of the extra charges to the power plants or they'd be forced to pay much higher utility rates because of shortages if coal plants weren't built and there were too few power producers for our needs. Or they'd be forced to pay much higher utility rates because all those vaunted "green" energy producers, which don't exist but when they do, will produce power much more expensive for the consumer.

It sounds like a "lose, lose, lose" situation for all of us, all in the name of saving the planet, of course.

Peter Foster: It's jobless being green - FP Comment

Global cap and trade and forced technology schemes are a lousy way to spend taxpayers’ dollars. They are also wildly impractical

By Peter Foster

Nothing more clearly indicates the supremacy of charisma over ideas than attitudes towards the green schemes of Stéphane Dion and Barack Obama. Mr. Dion’s “Green Shift” was a lead balloon, carried by a man whose earnest personality was already a millstone. And yet U.S. president-elect Obama’s far more potentially-disastrous plans to create “green jobs” is being portrayed as inspirational leadership.

[Via JunkScience]