Having failed to lower the sea levels in his first term, President Obama, in the first SOTU of his second term, highlighted the need for fighting climate change and proposed an Energy Security Trust Fund to siphon off money from those who actually produce abundant and useable energy to fund alternative energy sources which constitute a rounding error in the percent of energy produced by various sources.
Two days later, Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., dutifully introduced carbon tax legislation to put the nail in the coffin of those fossil fuels President Obama blamed for causing Superstorm Sandy, droughts and floods, stopping just short of a plague of locusts.
The bill would impose a $20-per-ton fee on so-called carbon polluters allegedly driving climate change.
"The leading scientists in the world who study climate change now tell us that their projections in the past were wrong; that, in fact, the crisis facing our planet is much more serious than they had previously believed," Sanders told a news conference in the Senate environment committee hearing room.
Well, except for noted climate experts like actress Daryl Hannah, arrested Wednesday in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL, we can't think of any that agree with Sanders.
The projections of the doomsayers were indeed wrong. Britain's Met Office recently stated there's been no discernible temperature change in the last 16 years.
While President Obama on Tuesday took credit for something he had nothing to do with, the natural gas and oil boom produced by a technology his environmental base opposes, fracking, conspicuous by its absence was any mention made of the oil barrel kicked down the road, the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline from Canada's abundant oil sands to our Gulf Coast refineries.
Worried environmentalists, just in case he was still thinking about it, gathered in Lafayette Park on Wednesday to demand Keystone XL be rejected in the name of climate change. Joining Hannah were the likes of Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance.
At the same time, just a few blocks away, as Hannah and others were being arrested, Sean McGarvey, president of the AFL-CIO building group, was taking part in a conference call with Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute.
The two were discussing the job benefits of and need for building Keystone XL, which has been given an environmental green light by the state of Nebraska, near whose sensitive aquifers it will run.
That may explain Obama's omission of Keystone in his SOTU. How do you placate those who want a carbon tax to further their environmental agenda while also placating a union constituency that wants jobs? The answer may be to combine both by tying approval of Keystone XL to passage of the carbon tax to feed Obama's Energy Security Fund. It's a Faustian bargain.
Terence Corcoran, editor of Canada's respected Financial Post, recently wrote of a "giant trap being set in Washington over Keystone."
At the annual Financial Post forecast luncheon on New Year's Day, Corcoran said: "I see new taxes coming in the United States, including an energy or carbon tax, to try to cover the deficits. The new energy tax would serve as partial cover for President Obama's approval of the Keystone XL pipeline."
The plan would be to have Democrats in the House and Senate march in lockstep while picking off enough gullible Republicans to make it happen.
Just sign here for job growth, needed revenues and a pull-back from the fiscal cliff. And check your free-market, small-government soul at the door.
source: IBD
photo: gulagbound
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