American Thinker: The Alice in Wonderland World of the Greens

An irrational fear of ‘climate apocalypse' has driven nature-worshipping green ideologues in every age generation. Being inherently anti-capitalist they care little whether their demands threaten to bankrupt modern economies, or deny poorer nations the same cheap, hydro-carbon powered industrialization path out of poverty taken by developed nations. For Green World, preposterous self-righteous claims are morally self-evident, Real World facts and reason mere irrelevancies. "The adventures first," said the Gryphon to Alice, "explanations take such as long time."

Waxman-Markey bears high price tag for families, businesses - Bill Archer and Charles Stenholm - POLITICO.com

American families are now focused on keeping their jobs, recovering the remnants of their retirement plans and making it to their next paycheck. As such, the timing could not be worse for another bite at this bitter apple. Yet some of our former House colleagues are determined to do just that with legislation to impose a cap-and-trade system, which will be voted on in committee this week. While the end goals of the legislation may be well-intentioned, the economic consequences for consumers and workers will be hard to swallow any way they slice it.

Cap and Trade vs. the American Dream by Michael G. Franc on National Review Online

...consumers respond to dramatically higher energy prices by changing their behavior. This means that the Waxman-Markey approach contains within it a hidden mandate, one that will force us, like it or not, to change our way of life dramatically. We’ll end up with shorter and fewer family vacations, smaller homes and cars, constricted commutes and (by extension) fewer job opportunities, fewer consumer purchases, etc. In other words, the only way average Americans can satisfy this unforgiving mandate is to do without things that matter to them and their families. We are being asked to forgo the sort of mobility, both literally and in the traditional American Dream sense of that word, that has defined our nation for generations.

If these tradeoffs receive the attention they deserve, the odds that anything even remotely resembling Waxman-Markey will be enacted into law go from slim to none.

This is the cap-and-trade lifestyle factor, and it keeps politicians awake at night.