Cap and Trade Lies Exposed

Here in Kentucky we haven't heard too much of the scare-mongering from the dirty power industry on cap-and-trade legislation. That's probably because the coal industry has this state's politicians so completely bought off and its residents so bamboozled it doesn't have to say anything.

The proposed bill, Waxman-Markey, doesn't come within a light-year of doing what it needs to do to create an energy industry that grows the economy and slows global warming. But it's a huge step forward, as opposed to the accelerating suicidal spiral into destruction the coal industry demands.

Kevin Drum finds the CBO report that explodes just one of the dirty energy industry myths:

Republicans have been screaming blue for months about the cost of the cap-and-trade provision of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill. It's going to cost us $1,600 each! No, that's wrong: it's going to cost us $3,100 each! Head for the hills!

So Rep. Dave Camp, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means committee, asked the Congressional Budget Office for a verdict. And guess what? The net cost turned out to be — at most — $175 per household by the year 2020. That's less than $70 per person:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion — or about $175 per household. That figure [...] does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change....Overall net costs would average 0.2 percent of households’ after-tax income.

Low income households would fare even better.

Coal is the buggy whip of energy. The industry's insistence that until alternative energy is providing 100 percent of our energy we must mine more coal, burn more coal and build more coal-burning plants is like buggy-whip manufacturers in 1895 demanding that the federal government mandate monthly household purchases of buggy whips until "horseless carriages" make horses extinct.

Next time you hear somebody - like, say, a certain lying Lt. Governor - talk about "clean coal," just think "magic buggy whips."

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....