By Sen. James Inhofe
Special to Roll Call
Oct. 19, 2009
No matter how many times Congress debates it, and no matter how environmentalists couch it, cap-and-trade will do virtually nothing to stop global warming, and cap-and-trade, as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said, “is a tax, and a great big one.” These are the fundamentals in the cap-and-trade debate, and Republicans must refocus on them.
We need to remind the American public, for example, that the 1,400-page Waxman-Markey monstrosity is a monument to big government that will make food, gasoline and electricity more expensive, increase mandates on small businesses, and increase the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy — all while doing nothing to affect climate change.
The Kerry-Boxer legislation introduced Sept. 30 is, in many ways, worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. This reflects the attitude of one of the bill’s sponsors, who said recently that, because of the recession, businesses should be expected to make even more expensive emissions reductions. While it’s never a good time to pass a national energy tax, one would have thought that imposing such a tax during a recession is especially bad.
But this is precisely what the Democrats did. And as cap-and-trade becomes more and more unpopular, one finds any and all attempts to change the subject to issues that people actually care about: jobs, energy security, clean energy, national security. Environmentalists have created a whole new green lexicon to distract attention away from their big-government scheme. But such window dressing only obscures a stubborn fact: As Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, put it, “Whether you call it a tax, everyone agrees that it’s going to increase the cost to the consumer.”
The rest of the Senator’s article can be read at Roll Call.
