Betrayed by Congress

By Alan Caruba

Mark it on your calendar, June 26, 2009 was the date that the House of Representatives betrayed every American in the name of saving the nation and the Earth from global warming.

It was the day that 219 Representatives voted for the obscenely misnamed “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” Only eight Republican members of the House voted for it and 44 Democrats voted against it.

The bill, some 1,200 pages, was not read by those men and women voting on it because they were not permitted the time to do so or have their staffs do it. The co-author of the bill, Rep. Henry Waxman, admitted that even he did not know its full contents.

The vote was not based on science, on economics, or simple common sense. It was an exercise in raw political power exercised by the Speaker of the House and her minions.

The bill puts limits on the generation of “greenhouse gases”, primarily carbon dioxide, setting up an elaborate scheme for the sale and trade of so-called carbon credits that will ultimately be the equivalent of the bundled housing mortgage securities that produced the present threat to the nation’s financial system. It is a get-rich scheme that will benefit a few while penalizing every American with higher costs for electricity.

The limits are justified by the claim that the Earth is dramatically warming due to too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Earth has been cooling for the last ten years and is predicted to continue cooling for thirty years or more. Carbon dioxide plays no role in the warming or cooling of the Earth.

The bill is a direct attack on the nation’s coal industry. Fifty percent of all the electricity generated nationwide comes from coal-fired plants. The U.S. has deposits of coal sufficient to meet the nation’s needs for hundreds of years. It is cheap and it is abundant. No new coal-fired plants will be built in America in the foreseeable future. Coal that is not utilized here will be exported to China, a nation that is building new coal-fired plants and opening them on a weekly basis to meet its need for power.

The bill also allocates billions for the development of the two worst, most inefficient and unpredictable sources of electricity, wind and solar energy. Presently, these represent barely one percent of all the electricity generated in the nation. There is no way, nor should there be, they can replace coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as a source of electricity. They are also the alleged source of “green” jobs.

As for “security”, a nation that cannot access its own sources of energy, coal, oil and natural gas, has no security if it must import them from other nations, some of whom are hostile to our values and system of government. The bill puts our fate in the hands of nations that support the goals of Islamic global domination. It puts the nation at the mercy of men like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and explains why President Obama made a deep bow to a Saudi prince earlier this year.

The bill must now go to the Senate where it is hoped that the upper body, though controlled by Democrats, will ensure it does not move on to the desk of the President.

If it passes in the Senate, the beginning of the actual decline of America as a great economy will be dated June 26, 2009.

Without abundant power, electricity for our homes, offices and factories; without gasoline for our cars and trucks, America will become a failed nation.