Three Ways the Climate Bill Will Change Your Life
Late Friday, the House passed the first legislation solely dedicated to reversing global warming. Now the fate of the Climate Change Bill is in the hands of the Senate, and political pundits are predicting the bill won’t pass. This exact bill might not pass but sooner than later one will and until then they will have several things in common. A climate bill will change how we produce and use electricity. It will change how you travel from point A to point B. It will change how every business operates and how every American lives. Our lives will never be the same. Dramatic? Yes. True. Yes.
The passage of this bill will change your life in three ways:
- It would affect what type of car you can drive - smaller.
- It would affect how much you pay for energy - more.
- It would affect what type of job you have - green job.
Energy affects every facet of our lives. When energy prices go up, food prices go up, clothing prices go up..the price for everything we buy gets more expensive. Why? Because our society is intricately intertwined with energy, and energy is intertwined with our economy.
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On Saturday during his weekly radio address, President Obama put pressure on the Senate to pass the legislation. “Now my call to every senator; as well as to every American, is this: We cannot be afraid of the future. And we must not be prisoners of the past.”
Yet many Americans don’t want this bill to pass. In a survey conducted by the Center for Public Opinion Policy Center, 76 percent of African-Americans want Congress to make economic recovery, not climate change, its top priority.
“An overwhelming majority African-Americans want Congress to fix the economy before turning its attention to climate change,” said David Ridenour, vice president of The National Center for Public Policy Research, who directs the group’s Center for Public Opinion Policy Center, which issued the poll.
One could argue that passing this type of bill will help the country recover faster and it will have a major impact on the country’s auto industry. Most importantly, it will open the door for smaller, start-up companies to compete which will need skilled auto workers. It could also level the playing field for many types of technologies including flex-fuel vehicles, hybrids, all-electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells or liquefied natural gas to have a stab at leading the way to our new transportation highway.
This isn’t the best piece of legislation, but it is a step in the right direction.
Driving up consumer prices will help the economy recover? Huh? I must have missed something in my econ classes, because that doesn’t sound right.
While it could be a step in the right direction for the middle class as well as those that are well off. What about the poor. The poor among us typically live in older, poorly insulated homes and drive old cars that get terrible gas mileage. What would you have them do?
I’ll just replace all my lighting with LEDs so I don’t have to pay more for electricity and just keep
fixing my 15 year old minivan anstead of being forced to drive a death trap!
Higher energy prices mean higher product costs. Higher product costs mean fewer products sold. Net result is economic collapse.
Boosting “green” energy with government subsidies means that currently profitable products will be driven from the market by the lower prices of the subsidized product. Effectively, our own taxes price us out of the market.
Lower product sales mean that jobs are exported to locations with lower energy prices.
In short, if the “green” product can not support itself with sales instead of subsidies, the green product will destroy what is left of our economy. Unfortunately this appears to be the objective of the Liberals in congress and the news media.
Productivity would increase drmatically in the presence of cheap energy. It is available in Montana, and both Dakotas.
Teh problem is getting congress to release this energy.
This just seems like a bad idea to me. This is going to drive the price of all products up at a time when jobs are harder to find.
I live in Michigan(I have a job), and I know many who are living off welfare, and unemployment. So let me get this straight. The government wants to drive up prices on energy AND at the same time, continue to pay out welfare money so the jobless can use it to pay their energy bills? Where is the logic in that?
This country is fast moving downhill…
@ chuckL: Does this bill support giving subsidiaries to green companies? Most of the reasons product prices are going up is because it actually charges companies based on how much they pollute while producing. This cap and trade system is not meant to subsidize green jobs but to make air quality a public good with cost, so that we are not giving it away to polluters for free.
Also, oil companies and coal companies, and American AUTO companies currently DO get subsidaries for their products. So what was that about subsidaries pricing better goods out of the market?
Spain’s been watching us go this route, and they’re shaking their heads. For every ‘green’ job created in Spain (an early adopter of the ‘green’ philosophy) an estimated 2.2 regular jobs have been destroyed. The net loss has added up to an 18% unemployment rate.
This has not done wonders for their bottom line.
Is it worth cratering our economy, spending trillions we don’t have, taxing the hell out of everyone who’s employed - to head off a problem that may or may not exist?
An Australian look at USHCN: 20th century trend is largely if not entirely an artefact arising from the “corrections” « Watts Up With That?
Not to say we shouldn’t be pursuing greater efficiency in our quest for electricity and transportation energy usage - without that we’re well and truely screwed as a technological civilization - but the call to economically cripple ourselves for something that isn’t proven is foolish. (Look at how well the frantic leap to corn-based ethanol worked out…)
Doesn’t the constant screaming of ‘we have to do something RIGHT NOW!’ start a warning bell ringing in your mind? I am always wary about someone who tells you that a working system needs to be scrapped for a really expensive replacement ‘because it’s about to break’. Took my car in for a brake change, and the manager of the shop tried to persuade me to buy a replacement transmission because of sound it made while shifting on the rack. “Imminent failure” was what I was told - I’d be lucky to get another thousand miles out of it (this on a Honda with 80k miles) - and he would offer me a discount that day if I could leave it for them to fix for the low, low price of $3000.
That was 20k miles ago. I had it serviced 10k back, asked the tech how it looked - he said it didn’t really need much - the transmission fluid wasn’t discolored and everything was working right. Needless to say, I’m not taking my car back to that brake shop again.
I’m thinking that AGW is a con artist’s dream. You’re urged to spend billions upon billions with nebulous proof which is easily created by ‘tweaking’ computer models. If the warming DOESN’T happen on schedule (and you really won’t know for decades, if not centuries) then you obviously spent enough on the right things.
If it does - you’ll adapt. Either way, the money’s long gone with the con artists who knew a good thing when they saw it.
Spain tried the same thing a few years ago. For every green job created, more than two were lost. Great way to fix the economy!
Oh, there was also a 300+ page provision added to the bill early in the morning before it was put before a vote. It called for California home standards to be put into practice in every home in the country. And if you want to sell your home, it has to meet this high energy standards, no matter where you live. This is just one thing they did at the last minute; I actually watched CSPAN while the House Minority Leader read from a few pages of the last-minute addition. Its UGLY.
W.T.F. The media was too busy reporting on Micheal Jackson dying to tell us about this bill?
I’d encourage the skeptics over the man-made climate change to think of the sky in Beijing.
The current consumption of dirty, noxious energy reminds me of human smoking habit.
Pollution’s one thing, 상율 한 - but it can be taken care of. Just look at the LA basin, look at the killer smogs of London. Change the fuel used, change the smog.
No need to completely destroy your economy to clean things up - just address the problem.