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Boxer-Kerry Senate Bill

TIME FOR INACTION ON GLOBAL WARMING - Kill the Bill in the Senate

The new Boxer-Kerry Senate bill would require a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020.  As a practical matter, what would such a reduction mean to us and our economy, asks Pete du Pont, Chairman of the Board for the National Center for Policy Analysis and a former governor of Delaware?

According to Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute:
  • A 20 percent reduction would mean cutting America's greenhouse gas emissions to our 1977 levels, and that would radically change both the U.S. economy and our personal lives.
  • We had 220 million people in America then; today we have 305 million.
  • In 1977 our economy produced $7.2 trillion (in 2008 dollars); today it is twice as large, at $14.2 trillion.
  • Back then we had 145 million vehicles on the road; today we have 251 million.
America has substantially grown, and our energy needs have grown as well, says du Pont.  So what would we have to do get back to 1977 emission levels and meet the Boxer-Kerry requirement?  First, car and truck miles traveled would have to be reduced by one-third (or fuel efficiency improved by one-third, hard to do in 10 years), which would seriously reduce travel and transportation, and likely force changes in automobile design that consumers would not like.

Next, the amount of coal burned to generate electricity would have to be cut in half:
  • So we would close more than 200 of our coal-fired power plants, and as Hayward says that would reduce our electricity supply by some 800 million megawatts.
  • To replace those millions of megawatts with non-hydro renewable power sources like wind, solar and geothermal power would be virtually impossible.
  • We have about 130,000 megawatts generated by them now, and the growth rate of these power sources over the last five years suggests it would take 97 years to make up for the shutdown of 200 coal-fired plants.
Boxer-Kerry would expand the control the government has over the American economy, businesses and individuals.  It would have little impact on reducing global warming but would significantly depress our economy, says du Pont.

Source: Pete du Pont, "Time for Inaction on Global Warming," Online Journal, October 20, 2009.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574482191245495128.html 

For more on Global Warming:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=32


CO2s POLITICAL FINGERPRINT

CO2'S POLITICAL FINGERPRINT

The Senate's Kerry-Boxer and the House's Waxman-Markey global warming bills could not have been better designed to inflict more pain on the states that swung red in the last election than on those that went blue, says the Heritage Foundation.

Consider:

  • The American Clean Energy and Security Act in the Senate and House's Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act both call for dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, eventually 83 percent.
  • When EPA's data for carbon dioxide emissions by state is compared with state populations and the 83 percent reduction called for in both bills is applied, a particularly eerie pattern emerges for those who live in the states that President Obama failed to carry last November.
  • Namely, the pain inflicted upon them is likely to be much greater as the work that their citizens do, the things that they make (one being energy) and the circumstances of their day to day lives result in higher per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuels for their state.
Why any elected office holders in the hardest hit states -- regardless of partisan affiliation -- would consider being party to laws so onerous to their constituency may be puzzling to the average Joe.  Politicians, however, know that after enacting onerous laws with one hand, they -- and regulators abetting them -- can accrue even more power by arranging special treatment of favored constituencies with the other, says Heritage.

Clearly, this approach to looking at emissions per person per state can't reflect all sorts of realities that would affect and be created by such massive and complex legislation, says Heritage.  For example:
  • Some of the costs imposed on Texas or Louisiana oil refineries and tagged onto fuel sold across state lines will ripple well beyond those state's economies.
  • Overall however, it is pretty clear that Texas and Louisiana would be hit harder than Massachusetts and California.
  • Non-too-coincidentally, Massachusetts and California happen to be, respectively, in 43rd and 49th place for per capita emissions as well as the states from which both global warming bills' authors hail.
While there would be huge costs under this legislation for these liberal, urban and coastal blue states as well, CO2 fingerprints would be all over the battered economic bodies of the red state victims, says Heritage.

Source: Robert Gordon, "CO2's Political Fingerprint," Heritage Foundation, October 30, 2009.

For text:

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/10/30/co2s-political-fingerprint/