Taking the Pert out of Expert

Myron has published his lying points about the Climate Security Act of 2007 in his capacity of continuing to drive us to hell along the shortest possible route.

A tax
Cap-and-trade can only work by raising the price of lower-priced hydrocarbon fuels, so that people are forced either to use higher-priced alternatives or to use less energy.

No nuance here.

Taxes are (a) for the purpose of raising public money from those who can afford it, (b) for creating a discouragement against a harmful activity for people whose decisions are taken on a financial basis (eg corporations), or (c) a combination of the two which can be particularly valuable when a lot of money is needed to clean up the harmful activity. For example, the tax on cigarettes.

Anyway, Myron prefers it when the price goes up according to monopolistic market mechanisms where not a penny of the money finds its way into public funds where it could pay for the wars for oil that he supports.

The "best" kind of tax—a hidden tax
Voting for higher taxes can lead to election defeats, but cap-and-trade makes it much harder for consumers to know that their elected officials are to blame for rising energy prices.

Clearly, as there is a tax system (established to pay for the First World War), Myron's logic implies that the United States has not historically been a democracy.

Setting aside that correct conclusion, a more intelligent person (ie not Myron Ebell, obviously) would have noted that in a democracy where the working classes vastly outnumber the wealthy, taxes would be raised on the super-rich who, during the Bush administration's slide further from democracy, have had the greatest tax relief over the past 8 years.

Idiot.

A wealth transfer scheme
The primary purpose of cap-and-trade is not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but to transfer wealth from consumers to politically-powerful special interests. That's why so many big companies support cap-and-trade.

You ignorant liar, Myron! And you know it.

Regressive
Poorer people pay a much larger share of their incomes on energy than better-off people. Higher energy costs will hit poorer people the hardest.

Climate change hits the poorest people hardest with floods, famine, drought and disease. The rich -- the evil toads who have historically paid Myron to lie and paid the newspapers to publish it -- feel they can escape it.

We could make energy efficient appliances cheaper for the benefit of poorer people, but Myron fights against it.

Big government central planning
Lieberman-Warner puts the federal government in charge of deciding how much energy Americans can use. It would create new boards and agencies with enormous and ill-defined powers and would require huge new bureaucracies to administer all the red tape. The ethanol mandates of 2005 and 2007 are showing once again the disastrous effects of even just a little central planning.

The whole point about cap-and-trade is that it is not central planning, because it is done by the market. The government sets the total quota of carbon emissions. Similarly, nature sets the total land mass, and the market has to trade within its finite parameters. You don't call land sales "central planning", do you?

Open to Political Favoritism and Corruption
It's not a co-incidence that the biggest promoter of cap-and-trade until its demise was the Enron Corporation.

Enron also loved your George Bush so much they paid for him to become President. Enron was so bad it could see opportunities for corruption in a child vaccination program. I remember reading you, Myron, defending it back in 2001 as it manufactured the California electricity crisis. Maybe they were putting money into your Human Extinction Institute at the time.

The Most Ineffective and Expensive Way to Address Potential Global Warming
The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme is proving horrendously expensive and unpopular, but is actually doing little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. See Open Europe’s analysis, "Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the EU ETS Isn’t Working", at openeurope.org.uk.

Your idea, Myron, is to do nothing! This would be very cheap for the time being until it was past too late. Say, maybe you have heard about the Montreal Protocol, CFCs and the saving of the ozone layer, which is why you can go out in the sunshine without getting cancer and our crops aren't failing due to being burnt by ultra-violet light damage. That was based on Cap-and-trade, and saved our lives. But why would a lying "expert" like you mention something that worked?

Support the Sanders Amendment

Myron, stay out of the debate. It's none of your business. Everything you have ever propose is calculated to cause damage. Go on. Shoo. Get lost.

slams door in Myron's face