06.01.09
Cap and Trade Act
“The Devil is in the Details”.
One more quote that defines this Act except there are no details………as yet.
Here is the third part of the “Triple Crown of the Destruction of Ontario”!
The announcement last week by McGuinty that Ontario………”can’t wait for Canada or the U.S. to implement this program, so Ontario has to lead the way”….. makes it fairly clear, or unclear, that Ontario is setting the agenda for the next few years for North America’s “new” industrial economy.
Did You Know?………..that McGuinty announced this Act AFTER the consultation period for input from concerned “stakeholders” was completed on March 3/08? Read the original site where the requests for input was posted at: http://www.ebr.gov.on.ca/ERS-WEB-External/displaynoticecontent.do?noticeId=MTA1Mzkx&statusId=MTU3OTI4&language=en
Conclusion: Don’t allow any constructive debate of a highly “contraversial” Bill to take place. Only in Ontario …eh?
Each announcement from The Green Energy Act to the Harmonized Tax Act to the Cap and Trade Act has had statements made during their introduction such as ….”we are planting our flag”……and…….”we want to be Number One in the World as an Environmental Leader”………..and terms such as this making one wonder if we Ontarians have declared WAR on someone and are leading our Flag into battle?….
The “War” seems to be declared on the citizens of Ontario to either go along with these legislative acts or suffer the consequences. We have been told as much in newspaper releases by McGuinty and Smitherman.
The Cap and Trade Act simply put is about as destructive and counter productive as any Act could be.
It is the “capping” of an industry’s expulsion of C02 into the atmosphere and then receiving a “credit” for every ounce of C02 under that cap that then can be traded to any other industry for money, goods or other consideration that pollutes. In the end the cost of goods rise and are passed onto who?…...US, the consumer!………
Here are just a few quotes within the last two weeks about Cap and Trade:
“Cap-and-trade is an economic program run by governments to charge Canadians — not “polluters” who in fact get to pass along their costs, and more, to us — for something we’ve never been charged for before. “
“Introducing it during the worst global recession since the Great Depression is stark, raving, mad. “
“And it’s not just electricity that’s going to go up. So is the cost of food and virtually everything we buy, because it takes energy to grow it, manufacture it and transport it to market. So is the cost of heating and cooling our homes, for the vast majority. So is our water bill, because it takes electricity to pump it to our homes. “
Of course this Act is promised to be in effect by 2012 and that should be in time for a full recovery of our industrial base in Ontario and just in time to drive any investment in new industry out of Ontario ensuring us of sustaining the “Have Not” status we now enjoy under the present Government.
Ontario has always been the engine that runs the Country but now has been reduced to being the fuel.
The Fuel Tank is emptying fast folks and we must ask the Politicians WHY is this happening?
To get those answers we need a Public Inquiry!
NEXT: Specific background references to the generalized statements above…………
CAP and TRADE: ORGANIZED CRIME’S BEST FRIEND
Reuters reports:
The British tax office arrested seven people in London on Wednesday in a suspected 38 million pounds ($62.6 million) value-added tax fraud in the European market in carbon allowances, it said. … “Those arrested are believed to be part of an organized crime group operating a network of companies trading large volumes of high-value carbon credits,” it said.
The Financial Times adds:
Anand Doobay, a partner at Peters & Peters, a City-based law firm specialising in financial crime, said the ethereal nature of the fast-expanding multi-billion dollar international market in carbon credits had made them an attractive target for graft: “There is an increasing amount of fraud connected with them as a commodity. It’s trading with something that’s intangible, and that isn’t regulated in the way some other commodities are.”
Since carbon credits are a completely intangible unlike every other real commodity on the planet, cap and trade has afforded organized crime a new avenue to defraud taxpayers and other unsuspecting victims. Now where have we heard people predict exactly that would happen?
Carbon Trading Is an Invitation to Fraud
Why Should the U.S. Embrace Failure?
The Fraud at the Core of Cap and Trade
Cap and Trade’s Inevitable Central Planning Conclusion
The Fraud behind Carbon Reduction Targets
Lawrence Solomon: Coal is still king
Posted: August 29, 2009, 3:15 AM by NP Editor
Carbon capture and storage technologies pushed by Western governments may or may not work, but …
W
e can’t continue to use the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide emissions, say governments concerned about global warming. Rather than storing this colourless, odourless, tasteless gas way up there, they reason, let’s store the carbon dioxide way down here, buried under ground or in the oceans.
And since burial solves the carbon dioxide problem, they then conclude, we can with a clear conscience crank up our use of coal.
This is the case in Canada, where the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy proposes a continuation of the boom that we’ve seen in coal mining this decade. This is the case in the U.S., where coal production has been steadily growing and where President Barack Obama touts coal above other energy options. And this is especially the case in the United Kingdom, perhaps the world’s most earnest warner of global warming catastrophe. The U.K. is today so bullish on burial that it has resuscitated the coal mining industry that Maggie Thatcher tried to kill off in the 1980s.
In the last four years, the U.K. has approved 54 coal mines, most of them open-pit, while simultaneously pointing to the aggressive reductions in CO2 emissions to which it’s committed — 34% by 2020. Scotland, which boasts the world’s very toughest CO2 reduction targets (42% by 2020), has approved 25 new open-pit mines, helping them along by relaxing planning regulations that apply to open-pit mines. Because all this isn’t enough, the U.K. is considering the approval of another 19 open-pit mines as well as upping its coal imports too.
“We don’t see this as counter to our climate change message,” cheerily states the government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change. “The U.K. is at the forefront of global efforts to decarbonise fossil fuels.”
The decarbonisation that the U.K. government refers to involves burial on land and — especially attractive for an island nation — at sea. A recently released Scottish government report determined that the Scottish area of the North Sea alone could store all the carbon dioxide that all the coal-fired plants in the U.K. would produce over the next two centuries, leading the Scottish First Minister to speculate that a high-tech carbon capture and storage industry could create 10,000 Scottish jobs.
But ocean storage raises a tide of objections from environmentalists, Greenpeace among them. Carbon dioxide in water could seriously acidify the oceans — already a concern — removing nutrients for plankton in areas like the U.K.’s North Sea as well as in shallow ocean waters, and affecting the food source for marine life. Some ocean storage technologies kill marine life directly. Plus, many scientists believe the oceans will fail to effectively contain carbon dioxide, which will be pumped into waters in either liquid or gaseous form. No one, not even the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, considers ocean storage to be much more than a concept, let alone a proven technology.
The potential for havoc to humans is much greater with carbon storage facilities under land. Carbon dioxide could adversely acidify groundwater, leading to leaching of contaminants into the water supply and rendering aquifers unusable. For this reason and others — an unplanned release of the gas could suffocate humans or animals, and carbon storage can induce earthquakes — governments on both sides of the Atlantic have proposed carbon storage facilities and communities have opposed them.
How will this all end? We can be confident that coal use will keep on growing for decades to come, in line with official projections that show worldwide demand soon doubling —without coal for electricity production, most jurisdictions will be unable to keep the lights on. We can also be confident that communities will successfully fend off many if not most of the carbon storage schemes that threaten them and their environments. Finally, we can be confident that governments, after spending tens of billions on carbon storage schemes of dubious benefit, will conclude that the safest place to store today’s relatively high levels of carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, where it now resides.
Financial Post
lawrencesolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
The REAL reasoning behind the Cap and Trade Act (not to save the planet but make huge amounts of $$$$$$$$$$)
The story below is a real indication of the importance of wind farms to
the Provincial govt. They need the carbon credits so they can cover the
emissions they create. You on the other hand are going to subsidize the
turbines, pay much higher electric bills, and live within a
predetermined carbon allotment. Wind farms and global warming are
intrinsically tied.
> The top climate science advisor to the German government has proposed
> that everyone on the planet should have a personal CO2 budget and be
> forced to pay a tax if they exceed it, adding that westerners have
> already exceeded their allocations and should pay climate reparations
> to poorer countries.
>
> This is not just another tax being rammed through using the phony
> pretext of global warming, it’s the entrée for complete government
> tracking and control over your personal life. This is the “inventory”
> that Nancy Pelosi called for during her visit to China in May.
>
> On May 28, the Associated Press reported
> <http://climatedepot.com/a/956/EcoNanny-Pelosi-Every-aspect-of-our-lives-must-be-subjected-to-an-inventory>
> that Pelosi told a Chinese student that in order to cut back on CO2
> emissions, “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory.”
>
> German climate scientist Joachim Schellnhuber is pushing for the same
> thing – the nanny state on steroids.
>
> How will a personal CO2 budget be enforced? Every plane ticket you
> buy, every time you fill up at the station, every mile of every
> journey you make will be fed into a centralized government database,
> creating a leviathan matrix system to catalogue every aspect of your
> personal behavior. Exceed your personal carbon budget and you’ll be
> hit with a hefty fine, with the majority of the proceeds no doubt
> going straight to the huge international banking interests that own
> the carbon trading market
> <http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=90090>, mainly N M
> Rothschild & Sons, as well as
> <http://www.prisonplanet.com/research-reports-obama-intimately-tied-to-phony-environmental-movement.html>
> people like Maurice Strong and Al Gore.
>
> This CO2 tax will bankroll the very same globalist interests,
> specifically groups like the Club of Rome, that resolved decades ago
> to invent hysteria surrounding climate change in order to advance
> their agenda for global government.
> <http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/140307hysteria.htm>
>
> “Schellnhuber is proposing the creation of a CO2 budget for every
> person on the planet, regardless whether they live in Berlin or
> Beijing,” reports Der Spiegel
> <http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,646506,00.html>, a
> “breathtaking” idea according to Czech physicist Dr. Lubos Motl
> <http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/06/german-climate-adviser-your-carbon-quota-is-up-pay-up/>,
> who said Schellnhuber’s proposal helped him “to understand how crazy
> political movements such as the Nazis or communists could have so
> easily taken over a nation that is as sensible as Germany.”
>
> Schellnhuber goes further, claiming that westerners have already
> exceeded their CO2 allocations and will need to pay climate
> reparations to poorer countries amounting to no less than $142 billion
> dollars a year, every year.
>
> “Humankind has to limit itself to emit only fixed amount of carbon
> into the atmosphere until 2050. [...] Because the industrialized
> nations have already exceeded their quotas if you take into account
> past emissions. [...] With the current output you see that Germany,
> the US and other industrialized nations have either already used up
> their permissible quota, or will do so within the next few years.
> [...] The industrialized nations are facing CO2 insolvency. This means
> that they have to notch up their efforts to reduce climate change,
> otherwise they will use up the CO2 budget actually designated to
> poorer countries and future generations,” he told Der Spiegel.
>
> The proposal mirrors similar measures called for by MP’s in Britain
> <http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1021983/Every-adult-Britain-forced-carry-carbon-ration-cards-say-MPs.html>,
> which would force every adult to use a “carbon ration card’ when they
> pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy.”
>
> The next step has also already been floated. Should you become a
> serial carbon offender, no doubt your thermostat will be forcibly
> turned down by the government via remote control. Sound too far
> fetched? According to a January 2008 New York Times report
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html?_r=1>, “State
> regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control
> individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a
> radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially
> modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.”
What Western Business Leaders have to say about Cap and Trade
For Immediate Release: Sept. 17, 2009
Contact: Michelle Hindmarch, Western Business Roundtable, 303.577.4615
Broad-based coalition says that Congress should ‘go back to the drawing board’ and develop climate legislation that follows 10 ‘common sense’ principles
DENVER, CO (Sept. 17, 2009) — A coalition of Western business leaders working on greenhouse gas control technologies says that the leading cap-and-trade proposal in Congress is no longer politically viable because it “fails the public’s test of common sense,” while levying crushing new costs on citizens in the middle of a recession.
Instead, the Western Business Roundtable says that if Congress develops climate change legislation that follows “10 Common Sense Principles,” released by the Roundtable this week, it would gain the acceptance of a public increasingly skittish about sweeping proposals from the federal government.
“If Congress goes back to the drawing board and develops climate legislation that follows these 10 common sense principles, it would undoubtedly be embraced by the American people, and it would lead to an explosion of technology innovation that would help us address climate concerns,” said Roundtable President and CEO Jim Sims.
“The Waxman-Markey bill in Congress, as well as other highly-complicated regional efforts to impose cap-and-trade schemes on the economy, are on political life support now primarily because citizens have awakened to the crushing costs, job losses and market uncertainty these bills would inevitably cause,” Sims said. “Voters demand that large government initiatives like this pass the ‘test of common sense.’ They want clear evidence that they can count on these programs to deliver more benefits than they cost. The plans being pushed now fail on all these counts, and that’s why Congress and other climate policy initiatives need to go back to the drawing board.”
Sims said that Roundtable companies “are on the forefront of developing the breakthrough technologies needed to reduce air emissions of all types. Reasonable rules of the road by the government are needed to guide future investments. But those rules would be much more effective if they focused on incentives to accelerate technology development by the private sector, rather than on government micro-management of technology development.”
The Roundtable’s 10 Common Sense Principles for federal climate legislation follow:
- Congress is best suited to determine how a national greenhouse gas emissions reduction program should work. Therefore, any bill should explicitly preempt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
- Federal action should aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also allowing for robust economic growth and job creation across all sectors. Legislation that aims to reduce emissions by forcing a further contraction of our economy — by artificially constricting energy supply and encouraging higher prices — will choke any economic recovery and will be soundly rejected by the American people. Therefore, cap-and-trade legislation should include some form of “safety valve” to ensure that the American people are not subjected to wild swings in energy prices or runaway cost increases.
- Federal action should incorporate, as part of any greenhouse gas emissions reduction program, a fully transparent cost-benefit assessment that yields a net positive outcome and achieves wide consensus. Consumers must be made fully aware of the potential economic impacts of proposed policies prior to any vote in the Congress.
- Federal action should encourage the rapid research, development, demonstration and deployment, through public-private partnerships, of a broad spectrum of supply-side and demand-side technologies and practices aimed at managing greenhouse gas emissions.
- Federal action should allow the electric utility sector to continue to supply consumers with adequate supplies of clean, affordable and reliable energy, and to recover all costs necessary to achieve any greenhouse gas emission reduction levels sought by public policies.
- Federal action should involve all sectors of the economy, all sources and sinks and all types of greenhouse gases.
- Federal action should recognize that climate change is a global phenomenon that requires comprehensive, long-term and coordinated worldwide responses. Unilateral action by the U.S. — without comparable commitments to reductions by emitting nations like China and India — will harm our ability to compete in world markets, export U.S. jobs overseas and will result in no measurable change in future climates.
- Federal action should recognize that the time frame for implementation of any greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements must be tied to technology availability, reliability and economic feasibility in order to avoid unacceptable impacts on consumers and the electricity grids.
- Federal action should target revenues generated by a climate change program to the rapid development and deployment of technologies to capture and store greenhouse gases, to appropriate assistance programs that help end-use consumers deal with higher energy costs, and to reasonable climate mitigation initiatives.
- Federal action should allow greater access to public lands (both onshore and offshore) for the development of domestic energy resources — such as renewables, oil and gas, oil shale, coal and nuclear power — so that America can continue to seek greater energy independence.
# # #
Contact: Michelle Hindmarch, Western Business Roundtable, 303.577.4615
