The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is under attack by some of its members for its opposition to the Cap and Trade bill. The Natural Resources Defense Council, through its blogs and through the website whodoesthechamberrepresent.org maintains a running watch on those altruistic companies who have either quit the Chamber or publicly disputed its Climate Change position.

To the NRDC, companies that stick with the Chamber’s anti-Cap and Trade position are motivated strictly by greed, whereas the companies listed above are driven by the purest of altruism.

U.S. CHAMBER CLIMATE CREDIBILITY CRISIS COUNTER:

Quit the U.S. Chamber over climate: Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, PSEG, Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Mohawk Paper.

Quit the U.S. Chamber Board over climate: Nike.

Refused to join the U.S. Chamber over climate: NRG Energy.

Companies that say the U.S. Chamber doesn’t represent their views on climate: Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Alcoa, Duke, Entergy, Microsoft, Toyota, Royal Dutch Shell, Seventh Generation, Dow, PEPCO, Cisco Systems …

Altruistic? Ehhhhh. Let’s follow the money.

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The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas W. Elmendorf, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the House-passed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade tax climate change legislation – would slow the economy and would cause “significant” job losses in fossil fuel industries:

We want to leave no misunderstanding that aggregate performance — the fact that jobs turn up somewhere else for some people — does not mean that there are not substantial costs borne by people, communities, firms in affected industries and affected areas. You saw that in manufacturing, and we would see that in response to changes that this legislation would produce.

Director Elmendorf also testified that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax would cut the nation’s gross domestic product by 0.25 to 0.75 percent in 2020 compared with “what it would otherwise have been,” and by 1 to 3.5 percent in 2050.

Elmendorf’s testimony undercuts the current position of President Obama and the Democrats’ congressional leaders, who claim cap-and-tax would help revive the economy. They make that claim despite the fact that presidential candidate Obama said his cap and trade plan will cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket” and will bankrupt anyone who builds a coal-powered plant.

You don’t have to be an economist to understand the economic situation.  Unemployment has hit double digits in many states and is growing (in Ohio: 340,000 jobs lost since Ted Strickland and Lee Fisher took office) and everyone is paying the price.    The stimulus has accomplished nothing (Again, in Ohio, in the neighborhood of 100,000 jobs lost since its passage) and yet the Democrats in Congress are intent on making a bad situation worse by passing legislation that would cripple American businesses and devastate families.

The focus lately has been on health care, and for good reason, but energy is an issue that should not be lost in the debate about the economy.  Because Cap and Trade (H.R. 2454, the Waxman- Markey bill) is a dagger aimed at the heart of our economy.

More below.

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Part 4 and Part 5 of his cap-and-trade review are up.  Part 4 goes in quickly about the differences between the cap-and-trade restrictions of Waxman-Markey and the Clean Air Act (very quickly: it’s the difference between carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide); Part 5 discusses the problems that W-M is going to give Texas specifically.  Still remaining: the Chinese connection and how people can get involved.

Energy policy is going to loom rather large, running up the 2010 elections; should KBH resign her seat to run for Governor, it would be helpful to have this guy in there.  Heck, I wouldn’t mind having him in there now.

Moe Lane

PS: He’ll be at the RS Gathering.

Full disclosure: I am in regular contact with the Michael Williams campaign, and I endorse him as a replacement to Senator Hutchison, should she resign her Senate seat.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Sister Toldjah) We should never have let Paul Krugman fester behind that TimesSelect subscriber wall. It broke something inside of him:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Now, I’m not one who would normally get into a man’s religious beliefs, but any faith that requires you to anathematize what was at last count 40% of the population* as ‘traitors to the planet’ seems to be a very silly faith for a pundit to have, or at least espouse openly. For extra irony? I’ll bet you that if and when Krugman gets muttering drunk, one of his favorite topics of slurred discussion is probably a tirade on the subject of the perfidy of fundamentalist Christians.

Moe Lane

PS: Sister Toldjah has more at the link on the topics on the peculiarities of Krugman’s faith, the sudden permissibility of defining dissent as treason, and this administration’s own War on Science.  No reason to reproduce her work.

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Congratulations to the House Democrats, and their eight Republican abettors, on the passage of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade tax climate change legislation.

Today’s victors are to be congratulated for demonstrating that by using dilatory tactics, such as posting the “final” version of a 1,200 page bill the night before the vote, issuing a 300 page amendment to the 1,200 page bill after 3:00 a.m., and allowing only five hours of debate, it is possible to pass a cap and trade tax plan. A plan that presidential candidate Obama said will cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket“ and will bankrupt anyone who builds a coal-powered plant. And show that it is possible to pass such a plan with a whopping seven vote margin - 219-212, with less than 4% of the favorable votes coming from the loyal opposition and more than 20% of the negative votes coming from the majority party.

It does make wonder what is hidden in all those pages that no Representative really had a chance to read, let alone study, that made the Democrats so determined to avoid a real honest to goodness debate.

The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Department of the Interior agency charged with regulating offshore oil and gas production, notified operators this week that it has been using European Space Agency (ESA) satellite images to spot night time flares in the Gulf of Mexico for the last three years.

Flaring of natural gas in small quantities is sometimes necessary for testing new wells (subject to MMS approval), and may happen from time to time if there is a problem in a processing facility, but it is hardly routine. If there is flaring going on, the MMS wants to know about it.

So they check the ESA website every day, and if they spot flaring activity at an oil and gas installation, they send out a little nasty-gram:

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Folks, watch the video below, then go here to call your Congressman to vote against Cap and Trade.

Go here now.

Michael Williams, current Texas Railroad Commissioner* and candidate for Senate, is doing a multi-part survey of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill currently before Congress. He’s up to Part III (see also Part I & Part II, of course), and here’s what he’s hoping to accomplish with it:

Democrats in Congress, joined with the Obama administration, are proceeding along parallel tracks to impose CO2 regulations so sweeping as to become the most expensive and expansive environmental reach of government into the lives of American families, businesses and consumers in history.

In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill that is designed to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming. The full House could complete action on the bill within the next two weeks.

[snip]

The prospect for cap and trade is less certain in the Senate and the EPA, while poised to finalize its landmark finding, has not done so, yet. If enough Americans band together, we can still protect the American economy, jobs, and incomes from undue and unnecessary CO2 regulations.

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From the diaries by Erick

The subject of the environment is a difficult one for conservatives. The Left has owned the discussion for years, always pitching the issue in the direst terms, decade after decade. When we have tried to point out reasonable objections to this extremist rhetoric, such as that there is less than a scientific consensus about climate change, we have been called “deniers” or worse.

This is doubly unfair because there are few things more conservative than conservation. There can be no doubt that being good stewards of our natural resources is necessary for human sustainability and survival. Unfortunately, in the public’s mind the Left has a monopoly on setting wise environmental policy. What we understand, as the Left seems unwilling to acknowledge, is that environmental and economic policies are often very closely associated. There are always tradeoffs for any change in policy.

Right now congressional Democrats, led by Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, are trying to use that conventional wisdom to pass a bill that could be destructive on both fronts. As even some on the left have pointed out, the bill may not actually establish binding caps on emissions, and may in fact actually contribute to worldwide pollution. This kind of up-is-down outcome is no surprise to those of us who understand how government is often less efficient at coming up with solutions than it is generating unintended consequences.

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