House Climate Bill Lifts Gas Price 77 Cents, API Says (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. House climate legislation may raise the cost of gasoline by as much as 77 cents per gallon, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard said, basing the estimate on a Congressional Budget Office study.

Buffett [subsidiary chairman]: Waxman-Markey a consumer rip-off « Green Hell Blog

Carbon Control News reports that in a June 9 hearing before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee,

[David Sokol, the chairman of Warren Buffet's utility subsidiary MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, said] utilities, and by extension consumers, will be charged twice under the trading provisions of the legislation, “first to pay for emission allowances, which will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one ounce, and then for the construction of new low- and zero-carbon power plants and other actions that will actually do the job of reducing these emissions… This bill will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and we think it is wrong to saddle customers with these unnecessary and duplicative costs that provide them with absolutely no benefits.”

The Chilling Effect | cooling heated rhetoric on global warming » Cutting Our Way To A Brighter Future?

Apparently economics is not the dismal science when it ventures into fantasy land — then everything can boost our economy! More regulation? No problem! Higher cost for energy? Yay!

Thankfully, E&E was good enough to quote Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who pointed out “”The authors of the report are … living in dreamland … Replacing lower-cost energy with higher-cost energy and requiring energy efficiencies beyond what is economically efficient are dragging down California’s economy.”