Waxman-Markey: A Bad Bill At A Bad Time

Much ado is being made over the folly of California Representative, Henry Waxman’s bill aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Waxman, teaming with Massachusetts Edward Markey, another Democrat, continue to tout the bill as “clean energy legislation that will create jobs, help end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and combat global warming.”

To obtain need votes and support from fellow Democrats, as Republicans are expected to firmly oppose this bill, difficult negotiations had to be entered in to.

Since it is touted as such a needed and beneficial bill, we must wonder why it has had such a difficult time being sold even to fellow Democrats.

Jack Gerard, President and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute sent a letter to Congress addressing concerns over this flawed piece of legislation that ought to be taken into consideration. API accurately tells us, “the bill will cost Americans billions of dollars in higher costs, kill jobs and will not deliver the environmental benefits promised.”

I believe most all of us are desirous of a clean planet to live on and agree that we must live achieve a balance with our environment to protect it and to continue progressing society forward. But, knee-jerk legislation such as Waxman-Markey achieves neither and ends up harming everybody.

Waxman-Markay first and foremost is a tax increase, a massive tax increase on every single American citizen. With our unemployment exceeding 10% and growing and our economy in decline, can we afford to feed our families with a tax increase estimated to reach $1.9 trillion on top of all the other taxes we are strapped with today?

As Mr. Gerard says in his letter, CBO estimates indicate this could add 77 cents to a gallon of gasoline over the next decade. Of course, this would be on top of current taxes and cost at the pump.

Can an unemployed parent afford to seek employment with gasoline costs increasing 74% in the future years?

Also very telling in the folly of pushing this bill forward is noted left-leaning environmental groups have withheld their endorsement of it for various reasons.

Rep. Darrell Issa tells us this legislation “belches from the caldron of liberal ideology, a potent potion of across-the-board tax hikes and job losses, putting the final choke on an already suffocating economy.”

Additionally, the national Mining Association has put together a map showing approximately how much more most states will end up paying for utilities under this flawed bill. View the map here.

Mark Hendrickson, writing in the Christian Science Monitor tells us, “By the EPA's logic, either God or Mother Nature (whichever creator you believe in) seriously goofed. After all, CO2 is the base of our food chain. ‘Pollutants’ are supposed to be harmful to life, not helpful to it, aren't they?”

As we learned in Junior High School Biology, plant life depends on and thrives on Carbon Dioxide, not dies from it. Greeners continue to remind us our plant life is disappearing daily, yet they advocate a bill that would remove a needed life element from our plant life?

Hendrickson points out the folly of the Green movement with their claim of, “Forget about the plants. What we’re trying to control is how warm Earth’s atmosphere gets.”

As we see our economy teetering on collapse, do we really need to rush into a new unproven policy that will obviously bring our struggling country more harm than good?

As API’s Gerard said, “the legislation would discourage the use of clean-burning natural gas and does not sufficiently pre-empt existing regulations, leaving open the potential for overlapping and inefficient requirements, costs that also would fall on consumers.”

We cannot afford to take such drastic steps and just as when the ill-fated stimulus package was ram-rodded through congress, leaving no one time to read and study what is in it, this bill too is on the fast track before those who will blindly vote for it to even consider the consequences of it.

Waxman-Markey is imperfect and flawed. Self proclaimed environmentalist Al Gore tells us that an imperfect bill is better than no bill at all.

No, Mr. Gore, an imperfect and flawed bill is just another imperfect and flawed bill.