Cap-and-trade: The biggest scam of all

June 26, 2009

Cap-and-trade: The biggest scam of all

Vincent Gioia

It is truly amazing that anyone really familiar with the so-called cap-and-trade bill could actually accept this legislation or in Congress, vote for it.

First, it is erroneous to think that it would have any effect on global warming because carbon dioxide is not the cause, it is the effect but unfortunately that battle won in the halls of science is lost in the halls of congress.
Second, it is also erroneous to say that the bill would cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions because most “greenhouse-gas emissions” are water vapor – carbon dioxide is a relatively small portion of such emissions.
The House bill is falsely alleged to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. It would also establish a new Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which would force utilities to supply a minimum amount of their electricity from renewable energy sources. The result will be: (1) everything used by the public will increase in price because of increased costs to producers from the need to acquire “carbon credits” for their operations will be passed on to consumers and, (2) requiring utilities to change their the means of power production from whatever is being used now to “renewable energy sources,” however defined, will necessarily increase the cost of electricity to homeowners because new “sources” will be more expensive to use that currently used fossil fuels.
The bill supposed to result in achieving carbon-dioxide emission targets by establishing a cap-and-trade system, which would require heavy emitters of carbon dioxide, and the oil and gas industry, to buy annual emissions permits from the government or through a secondary market. It is not rocket science to understand that any money spent on acquiring “annual emissions permits” is simply another expense of utilities and by law and public utility regulations in all states public utilities are guaranteed to earn minimum profits since they are regulated monopolies. In order to “earn” their minimum profits, the cost of electricity to consumers, residential and commercial, has to be increased.
The plan, as written by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, would auction a small percentage of the available permits, or allowances, directly to companies. The rest, more than 85 percent, would be given away to selected industries, local utility companies, states and Indian tribes. The idea itself is ludicrous but it would be nice if congress could explain why Indian tribes would be given available permits – surely casinos don’t emit much “greenhouse gas”, unless you consider cigarette smoke in that category.
Democrats and Republican supporters contended the legislation would help reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, increase the use of renewable energy such as solar and wind power and increase employment in clean energy industries. How ridiculous that is. Most oil is used to produce fuel for the transportation industry, cars for example. How will solar power and windmills power automobiles and trucks? Not only that, it has been established that production of renewable fuels such as ethanol consume more energy than produced by the products and also involve substantial emissions of “greenhouse gas,” e.g. carbon dioxide. The claim of reducing either reliance on foreign oil or reduction of greenhouse gas is a plain lie.
Obama said “This is a jobs bill” and would increase employment in clean energy industries. There may well be new jobs created but they will be more than offset by the numbers of jobs lost. As manufacturing costs increase businesses will have no choice but to reduce employment as will businesses that depend on those manufactured products. Increased unemployment will also reduce consumer income thereby accelerating the downward spiral of our economy. House Republican Leader John A. Boehner said the bill will cost the economy up to 2.7 million jobs and he may be underestimating the effect.
“When it comes to energy, Washington Democrats, I think, are poised to make matters worse by imposing a job-killing energy tax, courtesy of Speaker Pelosi. This is going to force small businesses and their workers and families to pay more for electricity, gasoline, and other products that are made in America that have high energy content.”
The basic idea behind cap-and-trade is simple: Government experts assess how much pollution can be “safely” put into the environment, then shares (sometimes called permits or allowances) equaling that amount are given or auctioned by the government to those who have historically emitted the pollutant. How do you suppose “safe” limits of carbon dioxide can be determined? Will continued emission of carbon dioxide exhaled by us be taken into account?
Polluters then must return to the government enough permits to cover their emissions every year. If they fall short of permits, emitters must buy them from those who have a surplus. The number of permits available decreases annually until a “safe” level of emissions level is reached.
The bill would direct 2 billion free allowances to domestic and international conservation, known as “offsets,” which would allow companies to buy emissions permits by effectively paying farmers here and abroad to preserve trees and employ environmental planting practices. I would like to form a business to sell emissions permits by using the money to “preserve trees” by letting them continue to grow; would anyone like to join me?
The legislation would require utilities that provide more than 4 million megawatt hours of electricity a year to buy a certain amount of electricity from renewable sources; thus assuring the cost of electricity will increase.
The amount starts at just 6% in 2012 and gradually increases to 20% in 2020, although utilities could meet up to 8% of the mandate through reduced energy usage by their customers. In other words, the government will figure out some way to make us use less energy (a very broad term) other than by increasing the cost – I wonder what that may me, government controlled thermostats?
Right now renewable energy accounts for about 8.5% of domestic electricity generation, but the House bill’s renewable mandate would not recognize all of that as renewable. Hydropower, for example, which makes up a large chunk of current electricity generation, is not all counted as renewable toward the new mandate, nor is geothermal energy.
A new amendment added by speaker Pelosi requires the president to impose trade tariffs on trade partners that do not limit their carbon-dioxide emissions by 2020. To get representatives farm states on board, provisions easing rules on corn-based ethanol production and putting the permit program under the Agriculture Department rather than the Environmental Protection Agency was included.
The bill would have far reaching effects on energy users at all levels of the economy, from giant manufacturers to utilities to individuals. For instance, new government imposed buildings standards would be mandated and some household items will be required to use less energy than they do now. These items include backyard spas, lamps located above art work, drinking-water dispensers and light bulbs in outdoor light fixtures. Are you prepared to live with that?
The bill would force companies to phase out allegedly inefficient products of the kinds described and replace them with allegedly more efficient – and more expensive and less desirable – versions. For example presently used incandescent light bulbs, now costing less than a dollar, will have to be replaced by required compact florescent light bulbs (those curly things), that already cost more and will cost still more in the future when they are the only light game in town. 
The bill would also make changes to the government’s Energy Star program, which recognizes dishwashers, refrigerators and other appliances that save energy. The tougher standards would mean these “energy saving” products would cost more than regular products and it would take longer for consumers to recoup the extra costs through savings on their energy bill.
“It doesn’t do any good to have high-price, energy-efficient products if people will just pay to have their old appliances fixed,” said Kevin Messner, vice president of government relations for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.
If you think you can avoid this by repairing older appliances, think again, everything will wear out sooner or later.
Vincent Gioia is a retired patent attorney living in Palm Desert, California. His articles may be read at http://www.vincentgioia.com/ and he may be contacted at gioia@gte.net

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Guerilla Conservatism

And yes, I practice ‘guerilla conservatism’ on a daily basis. Thanks for noticing. I fight the Progressive/Socialist movement and its misguided minions with every legal weapon at my disposal.

Constitutionalism is descriptive of a complicated concept, deeply imbedded in historical experience, which subjects the officials who exercise governmental powers to the limitations of a higher law. Constitutionalism proclaims the desirability of the rule of law as opposed to rule by the arbitrary judgment or mere fiat of public officials…. Throughout the literature dealing with modern public law and the foundations of statecraft the central element of the concept of constitutionalism is that in political society government officials are not free to do anything they please in any manner they choose; they are bound to observe both the limitations on power and the procedures which are set out in the supreme, constitutional law of the community. It may therefore be said that the touchstone of constitutionalism is the concept of limited government under a higher law.
--
David Fellman
Political scientist and constitutional scholar

Audit Passes
Audit the Fed Amendment Passes 43-26!

On Thursday, November 19, 2009, after several hours of heated debate, the Paul-Grayson “Audit the Fed” amendment passed 43-26 in the House Financial Services Committee. The amendment calls for a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve and replaces the opposing “placebo” amendment proposed by Mel Watt.

Why Audit?

Why Audit The Federal Reserve?

Ron Paul’s legislation is aimed at pulling back the curtain from a secretive and unaccountable Federal Reserve. Congress and the American people have minimal, if any, oversight over trillions of dollars that the Fed controls.

With recent bailouts and spending decisions shining a spotlight on the actions of the Federal Reserve, more and more pressure is bearing down on Congress to take action and demand accountability and transparency.

Auditing the Fed is only the first step towards exposing this antiquated insider-run creature to the powerful forces of free-market competition. Once there are viable alternatives to the monopolistic fiat dollar, the Federal Reserve will have to become honest and transparent if it wants to remain in business.

http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/audit-the-federal-reserve-hr-1207/

Biggest Liars
The biggest liars are the ones making the most money on our planet
Privately Owned!

Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (1982)

John L. Lewis, Plaintiff/Appellant,

v.

United States of America, Defendant/Appellee.



The court ruled that the Federal Reserve Banks are "independent, privately
owned and locally controlled corporations
", and there is not sufficient
"federal government control over 'detailed physical performance' and 'day to day
operation'" of the Federal Reserve Bank for it to be considered a federal
agency:





Federal reserve banks are not federal instrumentalities for purposes of a
Federal Tort Claims Act, but are independent, privately owned and locally
controlled corporations in light of fact that direct supervision and control of
each bank is exercised by board of directors, federal reserve banks, though
heavily regulated, are locally controlled by their member banks, banks are
listed neither as "wholly owned" government corporations nor as "mixed
ownership" corporations; federal reserve banks receive no appropriated funds
from Congress and the banks are empowered to sue and be sued in their own names.
. . .

 

Ron Paul

“I am very, very confident that the message of freedom and limited government and non-interventionist foreign policy is the right way to go, and I think people like to hear that,” Paul said.

A retired obstetrician, Paul practices what he preaches.
He refuses his
congressional pension and didn’t allow his five children to take federal student
loans.

Transparency a must

Transparency a must for Federal Reserve

Jon Kovaciny, Mankato

I strongly urge our senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, to follow the lead of Rep. Tim Walz in co-sponsoring a bill requiring more transparency for the Federal Reserve, our nation’s central bank.

The Fed, under chairman Ben Bernanke, played a significant role in engineering and executing the bailouts. Hundreds of billions of dollars were created and doled out to various banks, financial firms, and even foreign central banks, yet we have no legal way of seeing who or how much. The Fed also creates new money to secretly purchase assets on the open market.

This remarkable power is not something that one would expect to find in a representative government; indeed, the Federal Reserve is technically not part of government but rather a private banking cartel given special powers by Congress in 1913, under pressure from the banking industry. In its 96-year history, the Federal Reserve has never been subjected to a full audit of its operations.

Last May, Walz co-sponsored H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. Since that time, support for the bill has grown to include 73 percent of the House. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 79 percent of Americans support a full audit. It is time for Franken and Klobuchar to co-sponsor the Senate version of the bill, S. 604.

Among the Fed’s stated goals are economic and monetary stability. Under the Fed, we’ve endured more than a dozen recessions and the Great Depression, and today’s dollar has less than a 20th of a 1913 dollar’s purchasing power. For an institution with so much unchecked power and such a dismal record, transparency is a must.

Accountability

Contact the white house, your Congressmen and Senators!

Tell our elected representatives in Washington DC to stop spending our future away liking drunken sailors!

Tell them we want Full Accountability from the Federal Reserve, Where have trillions of our tax dollars gone and why?

Tell Them we are done paying billions of dollars per year to the Federal Reserve banking cartel in interest on our own damn money!!!

War on the dollar

U.S. federal reserve chief Benjamin Bernanke has declared war on the dollar.

"The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."

— Benjamin S. Bernanke,
Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve

Word Cloud
Indefensible

It is primarily the FED (and government) who got us in this mess, and make no mistake it's going to get much worse. The lengths people go to defend the FED is just pathetic. The notion that the people don't have the right to know where their hard earned money goes is an indefensible stand to take. It defies reason. Most people who take this stand either don't understand the FED or have an agenda.

Jefferson_ETF
Global Warming Fraud

Man-made global warming fraud highlights:

1. Prominent environmental scientists organize a boycott of scientific journals if those journals publish scholarly material from global warming dissidents.

2. The scientists then orchestrate attacks on the dissidents because of their lack of scholarly material published in scientific journals.

3. The scientists block from the UN’s report on global warming evidence that is harmful to the anthropogenic global warming consensus.

4. The scientists, when faced with a freedom of information act request for their correspondence and data, delete the correspondence and data lest it be used against them.

5. The scientists fabricate data when their data fails to prove the earth is warming. In fact, in more than one case, scientists engaged in lengthy emails on how to insert additional made up data that would in turn cause their claims to stand out as legitimate.

We’re dealing with fabricated and deleted data, and an orchestrated effort to undermine global warming dissidents. Faked data in particular is a big deal: many politicians are using eco-alarmism based on fear of global warming to assault American freedoms.

What does it mean for America if it turns out that a few scientists at the
top were actively involved in scientific fraud
to promote their own agendas?

No Evidence!

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

“Climategate”

"Climategate" investigation, the stakes in the e-mail controversy are significant, "as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rule makings and cap and trade legislation was contrived and fabricated."

12 of the 26 scientists who wrote the relevant section of a U.N. global warming report are "up to their necks in ClimateGate."

The professional association for physicists APS is facing internal pressure from some of its most distinguished members, who say the burgeoning ClimateGate scandal means the group should rescind its 2007 statement declaring that global warming represents a dire international emergency.

"By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen...

People do not believe

Public awareness reached a new high in the summer of 2006 with the publicity around Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The Pew Center for People and the Press conducted a telephone survey of 1,501 adults between June 14 and June 19, 2006, a period timed to coincide with the high point of the media’s interest in Gore’s movie. By far the biggest finding was that the movie had done virtually nothing to increase the saliency of global warming among voters.

Pew researchers noted that “out of a list of 19 issues, Republicans rank global warming 19th and Democrats and Independents rank it 13th.” By January 2007, global warming’s relative importance actually declined to 21st out of 21 issues for Republicans, 17th out of 21 issues for Democrats, and 19th out of 21 issues for independents.

Three Things

Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate!

They’re calling it “Climategate.” The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade or so revealed by a thousand or so emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following a leak from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers.
Here are three things everyone should know about the Climategate Papers. Links are provided so that the full context of every quote can be seen by anyone interested.

First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results.

Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication.

Finally, the scientists worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom.

Peer Review

Data fabrication and algorithm manipulation are not the only important issues here.

The travesty is that they were peer-reviewing each other's work! They had control of their own process. It was a closed-loop system comprised of several dozen researchers in an incestuous, self-affirming academic relationship.

Embarrassing

Embarrassing isn't it?

Show us a single piece of evidence that man's CO2 is causing warming.

Give us the page number in the IPCC reports that give such evidence.

Climategate will go down as unmasking the biggest science scandal of this century.

CO2

There are many pressing pollution problems that are real issues that should be solved first.

Isn’t it also true that there were equally dire predictions of global cooling only 35 years ago?

Isn’t it further true that these all-knowing climatologists can’t predict a season of hurricanes, drought, or snowstorms, or for that matter an accurate weather forecast for more than 10 days, except in a Southern California summer?

After all, climatology is little more than a soft-science duded up in jargon, self-made computer wizardry, and political pomp?

No, the science is not settled. What is settled is the AGW blind adherence to a very unscientific approach to natural phenomena. Since when are scientific principles and conclusions settled by consensus?

If these self-important Wizards continue their path, they will be routed out and forced into an honest living selling pencils & begging for spare change on the corner. Their hot air is the problem.

Copenhagen

The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise
taxes and cost jobs — particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake,
Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference.



--
Sarah Palin

Elites words

Here are the words of the elites, admitting they contrived this:

On manipulating America with environmental issues:
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. …The real enemy then is humanity itself. Democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead.”

– Richard Haass, Club of Rome Document, 1991 p. 71,75 1993

Calendar
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About time

The Climategate e-mail release is a watershed moment in the history of hoaxes. But while it reveals just the tip of the fraudulent climate change iceberg, it is also at long last a victory for those who wish to be good stewards of the planet's environment without crippling human productivity.

It is time for a constructive debate about how to maintain the global economy in a responsible way that honors the planet and the needs of the people who live on it.

Scientific Consensus

In late 2009, the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took a serious hit when email exchanges between some of its senior authors and editors revealed deliberate efforts to falsify data and silence dissenting scientists. The IPCC's reputation was already waning in the wake of scandals concerning Michael Mann's "hockey stick" temperature diagram and the role of government officials and environmental activists in its so-called "peer review" process. The IPCC Email Scandal of November 2009 meant the IPCC could no longer claim to represent the "scientific consensus" on global warming.

Emails exchanged by Phil Jones and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveal a conspiracy to falsify the actual temperature record and silence so-called "skeptics." Anyone who continues to cite the IPCC as representing the "consensus" on global warming is wrong. The IPCC has been totally discredited.

Prove It

It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do.