Wednesday, September 09, 2009


Cap and Trade’s Bait and Switch
This morning we reported on a recently-leaked document from the G20 Climate Finance Experts Group detailing that while Congress has promised to give Waxman-Markey’s energy tax revenues to Americans, Obama administration negotiators are promising to give that very same money to the governments of China, India and a host of other countries.

But that is just the beginning of cap and trade’s duplicity exposed by the documents. Page 10 of the document shows that those working to give our income away know they can’t be straight forward:

“A second question is how to address funding sources that might not be included in a contributor’s up front commitment. In particular, carbon markets are likely to provide a large fraction of financing for some contributors yet may be difficult to pledge.”

Translation: “If taxpayers [contributors] know that cap and trade commits America to sending hundreds of billions of dollars per year to foreign governments for decades to come, they might not like it so much.”

Who decides how much the rich countries need to transfer to the rest of the world? This group of finance experts offers two options with one being strongly preferred. The trick, here, is that “contributors” means “decision-makers” more than it actually means “contributors.”...

...Question: If you put a dollar in the homeless person’s cup, the homeless person puts in a nickel but keeps it all, are you both contributors? If you said “yes,” you are well on your way to being a climate finance expert.

Next question: Should you and the homeless person vote on how much you put in the cup?...