Congress is considering an "Energy Bill" known as the Lieberman-Warner bill. The plan calls for a "cap and trade" system, under which companies can trade permits giving them the right to emit a certain amount of pollution, "capped" below current emission levels." If you go above the limits, you must buy credits from the government. That's a tax.
The non-profit Institute for Energy Research (IER) also waded in against the bill, launching an advertising campaign aimed at halting it in its tracks.
Taking the same tack as Bush and McConnell, IER argued that the bill "could have catastrophic impacts on American jobs, household income, gasoline and home-heating prices and more."
"Placing hidden taxes on the energy we use, as this bill does, is the economic equivalent of unilateral disarmament," IER president Thomas Pyle said.
What will this do to gas prices?
An Environmental Protection Agency analysis of a similar cap-and-trade proposal found that gas prices would rise by 26 cents per gallon. Energy-price increases will hit manufacturers the hardest.
What's more, this type of plan has already been tried in Europe. So how did it do there?
When Europe launched its system in 2005 as a way to meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol, it cast itself as a leader in the fight against global warming. The U.S., which didn't sign on to Kyoto, was criticized for being a laggard.
But Europe's first three years of cap-and-trade encountered problems, and emissions have risen instead of fallen. European regulators note that the program has just completed its pilot phase, but they acknowledge that changes are needed.
Europe pays more for gas than we do.
Europeans pay far more for fuel than people in other parts of the world because they face an excise tax on top of a national value-added tax that varies from country to country. This means gas costs on average US$9 (euro5.80) a gallon and filling up a car at the gas pump can cost some euro70 (US$108).
Their Cap and Trade System has added to the problem. And those who think this plan is the way to save the world respond
...the answer is to use less oil, not to cut fuel taxes, EU officials and some finance ministers from the 15 nations that share the euro said on the margins of talks at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
The head of the euro finance ministers' group, Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, said ``short-term tax measures could not be used to lighten the burden.''
And they way to use less oil, they believe, is for higher prices. Cap and Trade is a nothing more than a stealth tax on gasoline and heating oil. And since propane is made from heating oil, it's a tax on propane as well.
This is why Democrats are consistently opposed to drilling for more oil to alleviate high energy costs: They would rather raise prices, through taxes and shortages in order to "save the world". Forget that no one has any idea that such a proposal would do anything of the kind....
or that the world even needs saving in the first place.
But you hear the same talk here as you do in Europe from Democrats here
The bill would help break the United States' "addiction to oil", Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said to a cheer from activists, business and religious leaders.
Breaking your "addiction" means breaking your bank account to supporters of this bill. Despite what they say on the campaign trail, anyone who supports this bill supports making gas unaffordable in order to advance an agenda that hijacks science for political purposes.
With Senator McCain pandering to the scientifically ignorant, I'll be curious to see if he supports this legislation.
