Obama Cap-and-trade Plan Uncaps Federal Power

President-elect Obama and his militant environmental supporters hope to quickly ram through a number of very stringent restrictions on greenhouse gases (GHG) — with carbon dioxide (CO2) being the primary target — via legislation, executive orders, and treaty. Obama, Schwarzenegger, and their fellow alarmists know that even with dependable help from the major media, their continuing apocalyptic predictions about global warming probably will not win sufficient public support to enact the sweeping proposals they envision. The public is finding out that: 1) There is no "scientific consensus" that man-made GHGs have significant impact on global climate, or that the measured warming of the past century is outside natural variation or anything to be alarmed about; and, 2) The economic costs of various climate-change "solutions" are enormous, while the supposed environmental benefits are virtually immeasurable (i.e., horrendous pain vs. minuscule gain).

Frank Ackerman weighs in

Once upon a time, debates about climate policy were primarily about the science. An inordinate amount of attention was focused on the handful of “climate skeptics” who challenged the scientific understanding of climate change. The influence of the skeptics, however, is rapidly fading; few people were swayed by their arguments, and doubt about the major results of climate science is no longer important in shaping public policy.

As the climate science debate is reaching closure, the climate economics debate is heating up. The controversial issue now is the fear that overly ambitious climate initiatives could hurt the economy. Mainstream economists emphasizing that fear have, in effect, replaced the climate skeptics as the intellectual enablers of inaction.

Author: Frank Ackerman | AlterNet

Frank Ackerman is an economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-US Center and the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University, and a Dollars & Sense Associate.