Cap and trade...while getting played...

Via Small Dead Animals (Incidentally...voted 2008 Top Conservative Blog just recently)

The Post cited testimony to Congress in September by Peter Orszag, currently Obama's budget director, estimating that revenue from a cap-and-trade scheme could reach 112 billion dollars by 2012.

According to Orszag, who at the time was director of the Congressional Budget Office, the program -- which would force companies to buy permits if they exceed pollution emission limits -- could generate between 50 and 300 billion dollars a year by 2020.

Gosh!!! That sounds wonderful!!! It is also a load of horse hockey. Before you get on your high horse and lecture me on the fact that I'm out of my pay grade, and couldn't possibly know whether this cap and trade nonsense would generate revenue or not, I'll have to defer to historical references.

The European Union gave the ole "cap and trade" a good go. It didn't work. In fact:

Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.

That's right. The "cap and trade" project of the European Union ended up being a windfall for the "polluters" and no one else when they scrapped the "pay for the permit" by handing them out free because the purchasing of said permits put undue strain on the financials of the corporations. The US economy is in worse shape now than the EU economy four, three, two or even one year ago. The companies that were to be tempered by the cost of emitting carbon passed on imaginary expenses to their clients. It's documented.

WE ARE THEY'RE FREAKIN' CLIENTS!!!! Nice tax cut Obama...it will help cover the infinitely higher consumer costs associated with the fees of purchasing carbon permits by the corporations that produce coffee, aluminum siding, lumbar...electricity...etc Pssst...corporations pass on their expenses to their client base.

The biggest polluters are profiting from this scheme...and still passing on imaginary costs to the consumer. Why should it be different in the US? More importantly...how did "cap and trade" do in reference to its goal of reducing carbon output?

Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.

Well done...well done, indeed. The intricacy of the scam is that there is no covertness to it what-so-ever. It's like a three year old with one hand in the cookie jar shaking his head vigorously to indicate that he isn't stealing cookies.

By the way...this sentence is buried in the Breitbart article outlining President Obama's folly.

Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses are the main culprits in causing global warming.

Really? I missed the debate.