Ben Lieberman, senior analyst of energy and environmental policy for The Heritage Foundation has an interesting piece in the New York Post that outlines the real cost of the 8 minute 'cap n' tax' part of President Obama's recent speech:
President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.
That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.
So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?
Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.
The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste -- and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn't seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.
So Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade spent several months rebranding it -- downplaying the global-warming rationale and claiming that it was really a jobs bill (the so-called green jobs were supposed to spring from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (that will somehow stick it to OPEC). {...}
But the new marketing strategy wasn't working. Few believe the green-jobs hype -- with good reason. In Spain, for example, green jobs have been an expensive bust, with each position created requiring, on average, $774,000 in government subsidies. And the logic of getting us off oil imports via a unilateral measure that punishes American coal, oil and natural gas never made any sense at all.
Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade -- again -- as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it's the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we're forced to use less.
The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump -- Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it "may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020" to meet Obama's stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector.
Read the rest here
I explained in my original critique of the president's speech that his remarks about us 'running out of places to drill' and 'green energy' were either outright lies, a product of gross misinformation or simply a combination of the two.
What is true is that if you look behind the curtain, there are a lot of high level Obama supporters who either already are or look to be making millions in government dollars for pushing things like biomass or wind energy.
Which brings me to another question; the highly secret 20 minute meeting between BP executives,Obama and the Attorney General that resulted in BP setting aside a mere $20 billion in an escrow account 'controlled by a third party', supposedly to ensure that claims are paid for damages caused by the Gulf Spill.
That makes me wonder...who came up with the idea of an escrow account? Obviously not BP, since the press is reporting that it was Obama that got them to agree to it.
Who is going to control the escrow, and what connections do they have to the Obama Administration?
What kind of carrot and stick arguments were used to get BP to agree? What threats if any were used if BP didn't agree - with the Attorney General present in the room? Were any promises made on what might happen if BP did agree to the escrow?
Were there any secret agreements? Did BP agree to kick in for campaign funds for any future green energy legislation? In any way? Will any of the escrow funds be used for that? And who suggested that this entire transaction and the meeting itself were going to be top secret and off the record?
In case some of you think that these are all wild conspiracy theories, you might want to remember that we've been down this same road with Obama before, during the ObamaCare fracas.
Given that Obama already pulled this sort of corrupt backroom deal once, it's not a big stretch to speculate that he's doing it again to help shove through another part of his agenda.
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