[AlexdeLarge]

In the land of HopeNchange, while the peasants are watching the circus around the death of Michael Jackson, the party is pushing into law the biggest Tax in American history.

The Cap and Tax Fiction
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

[odegaard]

There's a ridiculous theory promoted by cornucopians that states we can produce more GDP by burning less energy.
aka the energy efficiency argument.

I've always thought the idea was halfbaked, but what's the point in debating hypothetical scenarios when we'll ALL get to see reality unfold right before us!

[deMolay]

Here in Alberta they are trying this halfbaked scheme of sequestering co2 in the ground in abandoned oil and gas wells. I don't really understand it all, but many are really wondering what the hell this will do to our groundwater. Many of these GREEN SCHEMES are worse than the original problem. People keep talking about hundreds of thousands of GREEN JOBS, if you do a little research you find out most of them pay less than Walmart. Another scam.

[TreeFarmer]

Hey everybody I've got a great idea! Let's risk all of our prosperity on a crazy experiment that everyone that can think two steps ahead thinks is likely to fail.

Seriously, this will raise our cost of production. In a time when we are struggling to be competitive in a global marketplace why would we want to put ourselves at a disadvantage? Do yo ureally think China, Russia and India will follow our lead within 20 years? Heck no, they'll use this to bury us.

TF

[deMolay]

The granddaddy of all scams tho is the Kyoto Protocal. Were western countries are taxed like hell and the money sent to countries like Africa/India and China. Meanwhile do nothing about the pollution in your own country.

[AlexdeLarge]

So will you turn off the tele long enough to call your Senator or Congressman to stop this bill ?? Of course you won’t…………..you are all frogs being boiled in a pot.

Devolution: 20 Predictions
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune09/de ... 06-09.html

As cities, counties and states default on their obligations and unemployment insurance runs out, devolution sets in.
Devolution depends on humanity's innate ability to habituate to nearly anything. Thus humans somehow adapt to concentration camps, bitter cold, intolerable heat, mind-numbing work, etc., especially if the new environment is introduced over time in stages.
Thus the middle class household might actually respond with an anger deep and hot enough to become political if their middle-class lifestyle was taken away in one swoop. But devolution insures that the process is akin to the famous analogy of the boiled frog: if the temperature of the water is increased slowly enough, the frog never notices (or so the story goes) that he is being boiled alive.
The middle class household forced to sell everything and move (surreptitiously) into a storage locker or into an RV will feel a shock of recognition that all has been lost, and that perhaps forces beyond their own personal decisions might be at work: forces which benefitted from Federal bailouts, for instance, in a way they can never hope to. (That $150 billion transferred through AIG to Goldman Sachs would have funded a very large national unemployment insurance pool.)
But if their middle class life is taken away from them over time, in pieces, they will habituate to each loss without any political enlightenment; they have fully internalized the MSM propaganda (and recall the mass media is owned by less than 10 global corporations) that the "problem" is their own, not "the system's."
A revolution occurs when great numbers of people realize that the system benefits the Powers That Be, not the citizenry, despite the PTB's constant assurances that this is the very best system on Earth.
So the surest way to secure one's lofty privileges and powers is to convince the people who have lost everything that it's all their own fault; if they were just smarter, possessed more degrees, had better judgment, weren't hooked on anti-depressants, etc., then they would be jolly, wealthy, etc.
In a similar fashion, local government will attempt to manage the degeneration of their services in such a way that the public does not realize it's being boiled. If the trains and buses all stopped running, people might be angry enough to turn off their TVs and demand some actual, real political change. But if services are slowly degraded over time, the public will sigh and habituate to it.
Meanwhile, the police chief, mayor, union bigwigs, et al. will be driving by in their chauffeured vehicles, making sure "the little people" are swallowing the devolution whole. The politicos' Masters, the Plutocracy who fund their campaigns, will fill their coffers at election time as long as nothing rocks the boat. If the citizenry gets restive, then the politicos will find their funding drying up (Heaven forbid!).

[AlexdeLarge]

Nancy Pelosi thinks she has barely enough votes to pass one of the great follies in legislative history, the carbon tax. It will be close, though: Pelosi actually told Al Gore to stay in Tennessee rather than participate in a last-minutes lobbying blitz. Most likely Pelosi didn't want to remind Congressmen needlessly that the whole point of this exercise is supposed to be fighting global warming, a theory that has fallen into scientific disrepute and on which Americans divide evenly, at best.

What seems to have tipped the balance is a deal Pelosi struck with Minnesota's Collin Peterson, Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, providing for special treatment for ethanol under the act. That was enough, apparently, to get Peterson and a number of other farm-state Democrats on board. The extent to which farm-state politics have been driven by ethanol in recent years is a story--a scandal, really--that has not yet been properly told.

[deMolay]

That is what CapnTrade and Kyoto is really about. Ever read anything about Maurice Strong. He was the architect of all these programs and enviromental wealth transfer schemes. This is the new Communism. People thought that Communism died when really all that happened was it morphed. Think Gorbachev just wandered off into the night. Read up on his new Enviromental Scam. But the Granddaddy of them all is Maurice Strong.

[dohboi]

Wow, what a bunch of delusional blather!

So you think apparently think that every established scientific body in the world that has weighed in on this issue and concluded that anthropogenic global warming is real and dangerous is wrong and you and the rightwing nut jobs you get your marching orders from are right?

The problem with cap and trade is that it should be cap and tax, or better, cap and tax and ration and curtail and power down.

But you will continue to live in your delusion, scoff at reality, and impede even these very sorry efforts toward reducing our enormous contribution to the unfolding global catastrophe.

Congratulations on that.

[deMolay]

Duhboi I don't think your side has won the argument, at least not by science and reason, emotionally yes. It seems everyday brings hundreds more scientists to the NO side and more conclusions that what is happening is much bigger than your Mommies SUV. Ie the sun and its cycles.

[AlexdeLarge]

So you think apparently think that every established scientific body in the world that has weighed in on this issue and concluded that anthropogenic global warming is real and dangerous is wrong and you and the rightwing nut jobs you get your marching orders from are right?

Sucka................Global Warming is the biggest scam since organized religion. But at least with religion they only "ask" for 10%. Cap N Tax is designed to raise your taxes and reduce your rights. Its all cloaked in greenie weenie BS to make you fools think you are saving the planet.

You might as well go out hunting for Man Bear Pig with Algore..................................

[dohboi]

"I don't think your side has won the argument, at least not by science"

Name one established scientific body that has come out saying that there is no such thing as AGW.

You can't because they haven't. All you well funded idiots can do is herd together random groups of other idiots, some of whom have degrees of various sorts, and get them to sign ambiguous statements, then claim that there is something other than the near unanimity that actually exists on this issue among published climatologists.

You have a religious and emotional attachment to your delusion, and I understand that it is not accessible to the parts of the brain that process information using reason and evidence, so I won't pursue this further here. What's the point?

But for lurkers, check realclimate, worldchanging and other sites linked there to get a clearer picture of what is at stake here.

[AlexdeLarge]

for lurkers, check your rear.................you are getting ready to be skull fu*ked by the bozos in DC.

You taxes are going up and your job, if you still have one, will disappear!! Or you could get off your Arse and try to stop this nonsense.

The Climate Change Climate Change The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

[Plantagenet]

Raising taxes in a recession is something that only economic morons (or the democrats) would do.

[dohboi]

You planet is going up in flames and your immediate livable habitat, if you still have one, will disappear. You're world, gramma earth, is being kicked in the face by global industrial capitalism even as she is going into her final death rattle.

You know, you goons have long ago lost the scientific argument, but you have won your basic goal--to delay action till it is too late. The world is now in a death spiral (see relevant threads in the env. forum) thanks partly to denialists constantly muddying the waters.

Congratulations. Hope you feel real good about that.

[dohboi]

Saving the "economy" by destroying the planet is only something an idiot capitalist would do. And of course, conservatives aren't for raising taxes in any economic environment, so saying this is a bad time for it is disingenuous, at best.

[mos6507]

You know, you goons have long ago lost the scientific argument, but you have won your basic goal--to delay action till it is too late. The world is now in a death spiral (see relevant threads in the env. forum) thanks partly to denialists constantly muddying the waters.

Congratulations. Hope you feel real good about that.

It's threads like this that are why I'm shifting most of my emphasis to the new site.

[AlexdeLarge]

The world is now in a death spiral (see relevant threads in the env. forum) thanks partly to denialists constantly muddying the waters.

Congratulations. Hope you feel real good about that.

And you think this bit#h is going to save the earth by raising taxes????? You are a Moron!!!!

[AlexdeLarge]

15 Reasons to Oppose Climate Bill

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2009/06/15_reasons_to_oppose_climate_b.php

[Plantagenet]

The world is now in a death spiral ....

There is no point in strangling the US economy to reduce CO2 if China and India are simultaneously free to produce as much CO2 as they want. The Chinese alone will add the equivalent of another USA in CO2 production in the next 12 years....and Obama has already given in and said he won't oppose that.

No matter how much the US reduces its CO2 output and taxes itself into a deeper and deeper recession, the world will see more CO2 and greater greenhouse warming because of Obama's kowtowing to the Chinese.