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Environment

Cap-And-Trade Scam

February 20, 2012 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 90, Issue 8

Cap-and-trade advocates often depict their opponents as “climate-change deniers,” thus portraying them as scientifically illiterate troglodytes whose opinions should be dismissed accordingly. Climate change is an undeniable fact of geological history, as proven, for example, by the advance and retreat of the glaciers that created the Pocono Mountains and Finger Lakes.

The scam is the proposition that the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars of economic resources, with much of them falling conveniently into the pockets of Wall Street investment banks, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, and similar special interests, can prevent climate change or even mitigate it enough to pay back a tiny fraction of the money so wasted. King Canute, on the other hand, was honest enough to admit that even his royal command could not prevent the tide from coming in.

Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a cap-and-trade supporter, named Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Green Exchange as explicit beneficiaries of cap-and-trade mandates. None of these entities, unlike the industries that employ ACS members, manufactures or otherwise produces anything of tangible value to society. Cap and trade also figured prominently in the business plans of the late but unlamented Enron and Lehman Brothers. Attendees at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, meanwhile, arrived in private planes and then rented limousines, thus demonstrating the extent to which they really believe carbon emissions are a problem. Some stayed in $1,000-a-night hotel rooms, thus reinforcing the perception that the conference’s emphasis is on junket travel as opposed to what most ACS members would acknowledge as work.

Proponents of the global-warming scam were the first to define carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” and to talk about it in the same context as nitrogen and sulfur oxides, mercury, and particulate emissions. This does more than damage the U.S. economy with uncertainty about energy costs. It enables unscrupulous special interests that put profits above the public safety to use the principle falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus (“false in one thing, false in all”) to turn this argument around to oppose regulation of the genuine pollutants.

By William A. Levinson
Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

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