Post-American Presidency (42 page)

This situation has no doubt been long in the making. But the Obama administration and the Democrats are now ramming through an unprecedented energy policy that seems designed to cripple the nation. And it is completely unnecessary. Palin pointed out that drilling to augment our domestic energy problem would not only help lessen our energy dependence upon hostile states; it would also pull America out of the current economic malaise. “Building an energy-independent America,” said Palin, “will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas.”
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In contrast, Obama’s energy plan mandated scarcity in the richest country in the world.

CAP AND TRADE

On June 26, 2009, the House of Representatives passed by seven votes the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, known popularly as the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill—a massive, thousand-page-long bill that would place limits on the greenhouse gas emissions that supposedly caused global warming.

Would climate justice ensue? Normalized temperatures? Cleaner air? Healthier forests, lakes, and streams?

Don’t hold your breath. Despite Obama’s pious public rhetoric, the bill was unlikely to bring any of that about, or do much of anything except bleed American taxpayers dry. The plan supposedly would reduce emissions by 17 percent from their 2005 levels by 2020, and by 83 percent by 2050.
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In reality, Obama’s cap-and-trade plan was a gigantic shell game, in which the government sold businesses emission rights—licenses to give off certain amounts of gases deemed harmful to the environment.

If you had the cash, you could be as big a polluter as you cared to be. Emissions rights could be bought, sold, traded.
The
Wall Street Journal
explained that this would result simply in higher costs for ordinary Americans: “As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to ‘offset’ their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.”
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The idea was to give the federal government enormous power to regulate the activity of American businesses—and to open up a lucrative new tax revenue stream. Obama was banking on bringing $300 billion to the elephantine and hypercentralized U.S. government by 2022.
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The tax burden from the cap-and-trade plan was so large
that a Treasury Department estimate showed that it would place an additional $200 billion annual burden on American taxpayers, raising every taxpayer’s personal income taxes by 15 percent—an average of $1,761 annually from every household in the United States.
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A Heritage Foundation estimate saw the plan as even more prohibitive than that, costing $1,870 for every family of four in the United States by 2020, and $6,800 per family of four by 2035, as some of the end-loaded restrictions came into effect.
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Another dire estimate came from Ben Lieberman, senior policy analyst for energy and environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. In testimony before the House and Senate Western Caucus on July 30, 2009, Lieberman declared: “The higher energy costs kick in as soon as the bill’s provisions take effect in 2012. For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000. But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012–2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.”

Lieberman called cap and trade “nothing more than an energy tax in disguise,” and labeled the bill “the most convoluted attempt at economic central planning this nation has ever attempted.” He said that “cap and trade works by raising the cost of energy high enough so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less of it. Inflicting economic pain is what this is all about.” He said that over a million jobs would be lost, “while others will be outsourced to nations like China
and India that have repeatedly stated that they’ll never hamper their own economic growth with energy-cost-boosting global-warming measures like Waxman-Markey.”

Lieberman’s conclusion was ominous: “Overall, Waxman-Markey reduces gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion annually between 2012 and 2035, and cumulatively by $9.4 trillion. In other words, the nation will be $9.4 trillion poorer with Waxman-Markey than without it.”
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In fact, the burden that Waxman-Markey would place on American individuals and businesses would be so crushing that the bill was a hard sell even among the Leftists and moderate Democrats.
The
Wall Street Journal
observed in June 2009 that “despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman’s many payoffs to members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership’s solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.”
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That sleight of hand worked on House Democrats. It won’t work, however, to stave off economic disaster for the American people. Republican critics were scathing. Said Karl Rove: “Cap-and-trade would not achieve its goals—and it would put America on a ruinous course.… Putting a tax on carbon means that every American who flips a light switch, turns a car key, or buys anything made or shipped in this country will pay more.”
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Rove also observed that cap and trade “would require a larger, more intrusive government bureaucracy, regulating vast swatches of our economy and diminishing innovation, flexibility, and enterprise.”

That sounded like just the thing that would warm the heart of the socialist post-American president. “Businesses,” Rove continued, “would reduce their cap-and-trade costs by moving jobs to countries without a tax on carbon or a cap on greenhouse emissions.”
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So more businesses would move out of the United States, to the benefit of overseas competitors.

Once again, it sounded like something right up the alley of the internationalist ideologue Obama.

Obama’s most determined, formidable, patriotic, and populist critic, Sarah Palin, was as unimpressed as Rove. “I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan,” she wrote in July 2009, “and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.… The president’s cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.”

Palin pointed out that the framers of the bill seemed to realize that it would result in Americans losing their jobs, making it all the more bitterly ironic that Obama was actually calling this a jobs bill: “Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.”
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Commented Chris Tucker of the Institute for Energy Research: “Can you name another jobs-creation bill that was so concerned about its potential impact that it preemptively included a benefits program for the millions of workers it expected to displace?”
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Palin asked a question that Obama the internationalist might have been reluctant to answer (and not surprisingly, he ignored it): “We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.”
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An Exxon Mobil executive with three decades of experience attended a presentation on the bill given by Richard Igercich, a refinery manager for Chalmette Refining, L.L.C., a joint venture of Exxon
Mobil PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company; Dan Borne, president of the Gulf South Chemical Plants Association; and an Exxon Mobil political analyst. The executive emerged from this presentation with the conviction that “the Bill is a very complex one and offers devastating results to you, me, our generations to come and every business in America.”

The executive said that the bill would deprive ordinary Americans of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and heating oil, and dramatically increase the costs of electricity, coal, and natural gas. He said that this was part and parcel of Obama’s plan: to wean America off crude oil petroleum products simply by making them too expensive for Americans to afford. “The bill in its present form,” he said, “targets Oil Refineries and Chemical Plants as the most dangerous contributors to Global Warming,” while there are “no scientific facts to support that accusation.”
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It was all political.

OBAMA’S ENABLING ACT?

One ominous detail in the cap-and-trade bill was that it gave the president emergency powers to act to stop global warming. The bill lays out a series of conditions that would be considered to constitute such an emergency—most notably, if global greenhouse gas levels rise above 450 parts per million. But it is a very real possibility that greenhouse gas levels could rise above 450 parts per million as early as 2010.

If they do, the president must “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions” to lower emissions levels. “The bill’s language,” according to investigative journalist David Freddoso, “places an unusually broad mandate upon the president to act in the event of this ‘emergency’ situation.” He explains that
“declaration of this ‘climate emergency’ could result in federal agencies denying all discretionary permits for carbon-emitting industries.”
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The president, in short, could destroy whole American industries that refused to tow his political and environmental line. And with broad and vaguely defined “emergency powers,” he could destroy the American system of checks and balances, and the restraints on executive authority that have always been the hallmark of the American Republic.

With his taste for socialism and authoritarianism, however, Barack Obama never much cared much for those restraints. And so constitutional rule was imperiled as never before in American history—and all for what turned out to be a completely fabricated crisis.

THE GLOBAL WARMING COVER-UP: “A MIRACLE HAS HAPPENED”

Fresh on the heels of Lord Christopher Monckton’s declaration about Obama’s plans to sign away American sovereignty for global warming came a blockbuster exposé that blew the lid off the climate-change hoax.

Obama had been poised to sign away American sovereignty for that hoax.

Suspicions had been mounting throughout the first year of Obama’s presidency about the supposedly assured results that purported to establish global warming as fact. In July 2009 Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, expressed the growing skepticism of many when he wrote in
The
American Spectator
that “the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric
temperatures have
declined
over the last 11 years, with the trend downward accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades.”
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But real cracks in the edifice didn’t start appearing until several months later. It all started with four words that shook the world. “A miracle has happened,” a writer cryptically posted to Climate Audit, a Web site devoted to showing that climate-change science was junk science.

The cryptic writer followed those four words with a link to another site, Real Climate. There, on the morning of November 17, 2009, was a veritable treasure trove for scientists and citizens who had long been skeptical about mankind’s role in global warming.

The computers of the Hadley Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, England, were hacked, whereupon over a thousand e-mails and over four thousand extraordinarily revealing documents were made public, showing how global warming advocates plotted to deceive the public about the holes in the theory. The miracle had indeed happened: it was revealed not only that “global warming” was a hoax, but that its foremost advocates knew it was a hoax, and strategized on how to keep that information from the American people.

According to Dr. Tim Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, the Hadley Unit controlled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports and prepared the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). These reports were the linchpin of the efforts to convince the public that rapid action had to be taken by governments to reverse the effects of man-made global warming.
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The scientists who prepared these reports were lying, and they knew they were lying. In one of the e-mails Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) and—up to this point—one of the most respected global warming advocates internationally, casually tells
his colleagues how he manipulated data to hide evidence that average temperatures are actually decreasing, not increasing: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [
sic
] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Another scientist admits that the data don’t fit the theory for which Obama was ready to subject America to international authorities: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”