Kerry-Lieberman bill generates power for government, special interests

With months of closed doors meeting and cutting deals with industry, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) finally unveiled their cap-and-trade bill. After helping to craft the bill, this bill contains many giveaways to industry and the end result is this bill that will increase the cost of every aspect of business and cost every individual citizen to turn on the lights and put gas in the car.

Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Green Rent Seeking Update

At a speech a while ago, I told this to an investing group a while back: Do the math. You can’t build a growth company on public subsidies. It may be possible to grow at first when the subsidized activity (e.g. solar) is a tiny percentage of the market. But once it starts to grow, the projected subsidies are astronomical. The German solar subsidy is something like 50 cents per KwH — to give one a sense of scale, the typical electricity price from fossil fuels there or here is something like 8-10 cents per KwH. Subsidizing just 20% of US electricity production at this kind of rate would cost $50 billion a year. Subsidizing all production would cost a quarter of a trillion dollars a year.