Friday Awesome: Say Goodbye To Cap And Tax

23 Jul, 2010 by William Teach

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At least for this year

Senate Democrats pulled the plug on climate legislation Thursday, pushing the issue off into an uncertain future ahead of midterm elections where President Barack Obama’s party is girding for a drubbing.

Rather than a long-awaited measure capping greenhouse gases – or even a more limited bill directed only at electric utilities – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will move forward next week on a bipartisan energy-only bill that responds to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and contains other more popular energy items.

Hey, I wonder what kind of stuff this new stripped down energy only bill will include

The bill headed to the floor will not include a carbon cap or a renewable electricity standard, Bingaman said. Instead, it has low-hanging-fruit provisions dealing with the oil spill, Home Star energy efficiency upgrades, incentives for the conversion of trucking fleet to natural gas and the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

So………what we see here is that the so-called energy, jobs, and national security bill was rather devoid of any ideas to increase and expand actual American energy production. If they couldn’t get 60 votes for the unpopular climate change bill (which is the way the Politico and so many other media outlets, not to mention all the climate alarmists, refer to it), and stripped it to remove the climate change BS, and ended up with the above, well, it’s no wonder they couldn’t get 60 votes. How about expanding oil, coal, and natural gas production? How about allowing new refineries, ones which are cleaner and more efficient? How about expanding real solar, wind, and hydro (geothermal is not something which would work in the USA)? How about actual energy? This stripped down bill proves that, despite talking points, the original was all about capping and taxing.

Waffles Kerry is still holding out hope for a “screw the American people with caps and taxes while the rest of the world realizes these controls are killing their economies” bill will make it to the Senate floor. We also see the collapse of the carbon trading markets. And, hey, look, alarmist Andrew Revkin blames Obama.