Canada's Sun TV News Channel Hammers NDP's Jack Layton On Cap- And- Trade Energy Threat
Clyde Armstrong
a Fox News North. Fox News Light would
be more appropriate. But it is a refreshing changefrom other boring
Canadian TV networks and channels. I have watched it several times and
found its news interpretation more right-wing than that of the Toronto
Sun newspaper.
The program I watched on Sun News TV this everning was a lively
discussion by journalists Ezra Levant and
Lorrie Goldstein. Both agreed that Layton's NDP cap-and-trade would be
a disaster if ever enacted. It would mean
much higher energy prices and taxes for Canadians (already taking a
whopping 44% of their annual income), which constrasts to the 31% rate
that Canadians enjoyed under the John Diefenbaker government in 1961.
Taxes have been rising ever since.as a percentage of Canadians' annual
revenue.
Both Levant and Golstein were critical of Layton's threat to regulate
credit- card interest on debt to 5%. The stupid
socialist Layton does not understand that interest card debt is high
because of the many defautlts.Putting a
ceiling of 5% on this debt would mean that hundreds of thousands of
Canadians would be disqualified from having
the privilege of owning a credit card.
This recent rise in popularity of Layton and the NDP is sheer, fucking
insanity. Canadians should remember what
the NDP government of Bob Rae in the early 1990s did to Ontario; Or
how NDP goverments stifled growth and
prosperity in B.C. in the 1990s when the rest of NA was booming.
Orlic
> This all-news channel has got off to a good start. It cannot be called
> a Fox News North. Fox News Light would.
SUN TV proves again that it's an outlet for Communism.
Cap and Trade was invented by that Communist Reagan and endorsed by his
right wing followers in Canada.
The GOP Changes Its Tune on Cap and Trade
SOURCE: AP
Republican presidents Ronald Reagan (above), George H.W. Bush, and George
W. Bush all supported or employed cap and trade.
By Daniel J. Weiss | October 22, 2010
Opposition to “cap-and-trade” legislation to reduce global warming
pollution is a common refrain among many Republican and a few Democratic
officials this fall. The program is derided as a “cap and tax” that would
drain voters’ wallets while bankrupting the nation. But ironically enough,
the three most recent Republican presidents promoted cap and trade,
including Ronald Reagan. They employed such a system to phase out lead in
gasoline, cut chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and
reduce sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain—all
without undue cost. Officials who are criticizing it now are doing so for
political purposes, and they could likely make it harder to employ cost-
effective, market-based policies in the future to significantly lower
pollution at an affordable cost.
For instance, the “Pledge to America: the 2010 Republican Agenda” promises
to “oppose attempts to impose a national ‘cap and trade’ energy tax.”
After the demise of comprehensive global warming legislation in the
Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gloated that “cap-and-
trade, which is also known as the national energy tax, is dead in the
United States Senate.”
Yet many Republican officials greatly admire the father of cap and trade:
President Ronald Reagan. Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) praised Reagan
last year:
When you realize the magnitude of President Reagan's achievements, there
is absolutely no reason why anyone would ignore his 'demonstrably good'
example.
Nonetheless, she opposes a global warming plan that would employ the
innovative cap-and-trade system first created by President Reagan. Like
Palin, many of today’s public officials are repudiating Reagan’s legacy of
cap and trade for cheap political gain and to curry favor with the
polluting industries that are supporting attacks on those who voted for a
cap-and-trade market mechanism to reduce global warming pollution.
A little history is in order. Cap and trade was developed as a more
flexible, market-based system to reduce environmental pollution compared
to the so-called “command and control” model employed by environmental
laws in the 1970s. The old system required each polluting facility to make
a fixed reduction in air or water contamination, which ignored that some
facilities could cut pollution more cheaply than others.
Cap and trade is a cost-effective alternative that allows the firms that
can more cheaply reduce their emissions below their required limit to sell
any additional reductions to companies that are not able to make
reductions as easily. This creates a system that guarantees a set level of
overall reductions while rewarding the most efficient companies and
ensuring that the cap can be met at the lowest possible cost to the
economy.
The Reagan White House conceived the first cap-and-trade program to reduce
pollution. It was used in the 1980s to phase out lead in gasoline at a
lower cost. An EPA analysis shows:
…estimated savings from the lead trading program of approximately 20
percent over alternative programs that did not provide for lead banking, a
cost savings of about $250 million per year.
President Reagan also signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to slash the
production and use of chemicals that deplete the upper ozone layer
essential to screen out cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. His
administration established a cap-and-trade system to implement the
chemical reductions the protocol required. A 2006 scientific assessment
concluded that “the Montreal Protocol is working” to reduce chemicals and
protect the ozone layer.
President George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, was the first president to
propose the employment of a cap-and-trade system in an environmental law.
The Clean Air Act of 1990 includes his proposed cap-and-trade system to
reduce the sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain.
The Clean Air Act passed the Senate by a vote of 89-10 and the House by
401-25. Many staunch conservatives voted for it including Sens. Kit Bond
(R-Mo), Trent Lott (R-MS), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Strom Thurmond (R-
SC). Conservative House supporters included Reps. Newt Gingrich (R-GA),
Joe Barton (R-TX), Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and Fred
Upton (R-MI).
When President Bush signed the Clean Air Act into law he highlighted its
innovative cap-and-trade mechanism:
The acid rain allowance trading program will be the first large-scale
regulatory use of market incentives and is already being seen as a model
for regulatory reform efforts here and abroad.
By employing a system that generates the most environmental protection for
every dollar spent, the trading system lays the groundwork for a new era
of smarter government regulation; one that is more compatible with
economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the
past.
President Bush’s prediction came true. An EPA analysis a decade after the
law was passed determined that the actual cost of cutting sulfur emissions
by 40 percent was substantially lower than it had predicted: “$1 to $2
billion per year, just one quarter of original EPA estimates.” A CAP
analysis determined that in 2006 utility rates were 5 percent lower (in
real dollars) than before the act passed in 1990. And the U.S. economy
added 16 million jobs during this time.
President George W. Bush also included a cap-and-trade mechanism in his
“Clear Skies” bill that would have amended the Clean Air Act. Upon the
bill’s introduction he noted the success of his father’s cap-and-trade
program:
The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments have significantly reduced air
pollution, especially through the innovative "cap-and trade" acid rain
control program. [It] has been a resounding success, cutting annual sulfur
dioxide emissions in the first phase by 50 percent below allowed levels.
Emissions were reduced faster than required, and at far less cost…The
program only requires a handful of EPA employees to operate.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced several global warming pollution
reductions bills during the previous decade. While running for president
in 2008 McCain proposed to reduce global warming pollution via a cap-and-
trade program.
John McCain's climate plan will be similar to the very successful acid
rain trading program created under the first President Bush in the early
1990s.
A cap-and-trade system sends a market signal that organizes the whole
economy around our environmental goals…The market evolves by requiring
sensible reductions in greenhouse gases, but also allowing full
flexibility in how industry meets that requirement.
Then-Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) also supported a cap-and-trade system to
reduce global warming pollution as the GOP nominee for vice president. She
reiterated that support (see 34:00) during the vice presidential debate.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) also endorsed a cap-and-
trade system to reduce global warming pollution in 2007:
I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system,
much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for
investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very
good. And frankly, it's something I would strongly support.
Gingrich has changed his tune, however, just two years later. He railed
against the “cap-and-trade energy tax” in 2009.
Why have Republicans and a few Democrats rejected this successful policy
innovation developed and deployed by Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush,
and Bush? In Gingrich’s case it may be the $350,000 from oil and coal
interests his political committee received during the first quarter of
2010 alone.
In addition to giving money to Gingrich, Big Oil, Dirty Coal, and other
special interests have spent hundreds millions of dollars over the past
two years to convince legislators, politicians, and citizens to oppose cap
and trade and other measures that would create jobs, cut oil use, and
reduce pollution. Center for American Progress Action Fund analyses find
that these interests spent at least $68 million in 2010 alone to air
misleading and fictitious ads on global warming. What’s more, many of
these same interests spent over $500 million in 18 months to lobby
Congress to oppose clean energy and global warming legislation.
The New York Times reports that these efforts are bearing fruit:
[Tea Party views] in general align with those of the fossil fuel
industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise
doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies
devised to address it.
They have created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-
warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science,
and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that
policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a
devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.
Special interest money, then, has played a big role in public officials
rejecting this tool created and sharpened by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and
Bush.
Among Tea Party activists, ideology also plays a part in their rejection
of cap and trade as a solution to global warming. Many activists do not
believe that global warming is real despite reams of scientific data to
the contrary. A New York Times poll found:
…that only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is
an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of
the rest of the public believes that it is. More than half of Tea Party
supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any
time in the future, while only 15 percent of other Americans share that
view, the poll found.
Tea Partiers, therefore, would oppose any solution to a problem they do
not believe exists.
There’s a bigger point to be made here, though. This summer the Senate
failed to act on global warming legislation that employed a cap-and-trade
mechanism to reduce costs. Noted economists Richard Schmalensee, who
worked in the Reagan White House, and Robert Stavins warned soon after
that rejecting cap-and-trade programs such as those in the Senate bill
could increase the expense of future pollution reductions. They worry that
policymakers would hesitate to employ a discredited cap-and-trade system
and instead rely on a traditional, more expensive command-and-control
method.
To reject this legacy and embrace the failed 1970s policies of one-size-
fits-all regulatory mandates would signify unilateral surrender of
principled support for markets. If some conservatives oppose energy or
climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate
change or the costs of those policies, so be it. But in the process of
debating risks and costs, there should be no tarnishing of market-based
policy instruments. Such a scorched-earth approach will come back to haunt
when future environmental policies will not be able to use the power of
the marketplace to reduce business costs.
Schmalensee and Stavins’s warning should be heeded: This current crop of
Republican and a few Democratic officials—in their zeal to curry favor
with their special interest funders and Tea Party activists—could doom
future efforts to follow the path paved by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and
Bush to reduce pollution in the most cost-effective way possible.
Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at
American Progress, where he leads the Center's clean energy and climate
advocacy campaign.
Canuck57
This too applies to voting NDP or Liberal I am sure:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results.
-- Albert Einstein
--
I can assure you that the road to prosperity is not paved with
fleabagger debt.