Cap-And-Trade Is So Bogus Even James Hansen Opposes It

Cap-And-Trade Is So Bogus Even James Hansen Opposes It

From reading Hansen's criticisms, it is apparent that he is a True Believer, and recognizes that this cap-and-trade bill is a fraud:

For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. Here are a few of the bill's egregious flaws:

• It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
• It sets meager targets -- 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year's level -- and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests - while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
• Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."
• It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, "businesses and households won't be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense," thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.

Hansen wants a carbon tax instead. I think the whole anthropogenic global warming claim is, at best, unproven, and likely mostly fraudulent. (And intentionally so.) But if you are going to hobble the economy, a carbon tax is far more transparent, and less likely to be used to enrich a bunch of financial conmen--which is why the Democrats are pushing cap-and-trade. Where else is their money going to come from, if not for the conmen?