craig78
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- Name: craig78
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He should show his support for gravity by not wearing a parachute.
On Rep. Rahall to leap out of a plane on behalf of coal posted 4 months, 1 week ago 5 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
Rep. (Smokey) Joe Barton boasted the bill would never get out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He was proven wrong. Let's make Inhofe eat his words too.
On Inhofe's plan: Stall climate action until the next president posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago 1 ResponseClick here to view comment in original post
Smokey Joe and the GOP go toe to toe with....carbon dioxide. Don't they understand how these remarks will one day come back to haunt them and their party? Don't Joe Barton, John Boehner, James Inhofe, and all the other GOP leaders understand this is not a typical political debate?
Climate change is not health care, social security, or tax policy. To give an example, the majority of Americans believe that New Deal legislation staved off the worst effects of the Great Depression. Many staunch conservatives, nevertheless, have launched a revisionist movement, sparked by the historian Amity Shales, to claim that Roosevelt era legislation actually prolonged the depression. They can make this claim without getting laughed out of the room because determining the effects of tax code changes on median incomes is not cut or dry. Likewise, if Dems pass major health care reform this year, the opposition will always be able to claim that the reforms were damaging to the US economy or individual consumers.
But floods, hurricanes, and droughts don't have the same ambiguity. Fifteen or twenty years from now, the debate will be long over. Carbon dioxide will have triumphed. Even with very agressive legislation, which the Waxman-Markey bill is not, even with global collective action on the same scale, even if all this happened immediately, from what I read, we are going to face significant impacts from climate change.
On We watch dozens of hours of climate bill debate so you don't have to posted 6 months, 1 week ago 1 Response
The lesson for Smokey Joe and his minions: Don't turn a scientific debate into a political one. You'll end up looking like a damn fool. And possibly lose your party as well.Click here to view comment in original post
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The WSJ reports on how the pollution credit giveaway, negotiated by utilities and energy intensive industries, threatens to create more deficit headaches for Obama as well as jeopardize his middle class tax cuts.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124204820923806673.html
And Matthew Yglesisas presents a Congressional Budget Office analysis that details how pollution freebies might actually increase the household income of those at the top of the economic ladder while decreasing the income of everyone else.
I’m enormously in favor of passing the climate legislation being hammered out in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Although not as strong a bill as I’d like to see, it at least establishes, as former Sen. John Warner said in his recent panel testimony, a “beachhead†to begin the long hard slog ahead. But these compromises, especially on the sale of pollution credits, pose medium term risks for the Democratic Party. As the WSJ article noted, the Obama administration might be faced with phasing out the middle class tax credits in 2010. And if the costs of moving to a clean energy economy fall disproportionately on the backs of lower and middle class earners, as the CBO analysis indicates they might without a 100% sale of allowances, that could spark a voter backlash (although if the Obama administration and other environmental groups get the messaging on climate change right, voters might be willing to make the necessary sacrifices).
The reason I even mention these hypotheticals is because the modern day GOP has demonstrated unequivocally that its members don’t understand (or deliberately choose to ignore) the threat posed by climate change.  So it’s absolutely essential that the Democrats retain sizable majorities in Congress. Climate change has raised the stakes of the game.Â
On Revamped House climate and energy bill has the votes to pass, says Waxman posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago 4 Responses