House Passes Cap and Trade

The House of Representatives today voted by a very thin margin to enact cap and trade legislation that everybody agrees will directly increase costs of electricity and gasoline for every American, and indirectly increase the costs of everything we build, buy, sell, move or do.  The effect of this legislation is that living our lives and pursuing our dreams will get harder. Our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be harder to enjoy.  Our daily lives will become more expensive.  We’ll have a tougher time giving our kids the opportunities that we’ve had.  We’ll have to work harder and longer in order to retire someday.  We’ll pay more for less.  Our best businesses will have to perform better just to stay competitive, and our marginal businesses will be pushed into failure.  Jobs will be lost.  Our Representatives are building speed bumps for everybody.

Why?  Because some people believe that humans are causing “climate change” by emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.  The climate on the planet has always changed.  There have been ice ages.  There have been warm periods with massive desertification.  There have been intense solar cycles, and there have been times when the sun is very inactive.  There have been volcanic eruptions that toss so much shit into the air that it cools the entire planet for decades.  The last ten years have been remarkable in the LACK of evidence for a change in global temperature, but for some reason the House had to pass this bill with little debate TODAY.

The skepticism over man-made global warming has been swelling for years. Other countries are backing off on their prior climate change policies.  Other countries have NO plan to limit their own potential by enacting this kind of suicidal regulatory regime.  China’s economy is a fraction of the size of America’s, but they emit massive amounts of carbon.  They have no plan to change that, whereas we are on the road to unilaterally crippling ourselves.

This insanity is not new.  We add corn to our gasoline to protect the environment, when it actually reduces engine efficiency, causes engines to fail early, pits food sources against energy sources and drives up costs, and the increased farming puts more pesticides into water supplies.  We buy ugly cars for more money, and the costs don’t offset until almost a decade after driving them under normal use.  Some people have been terrified into the idea that we’re killing ourselves with carbon dioxide by people who have personal stakes in companies that stand to benefit directly from passing legislation to “prevent” it.  If I told you your tits were going to fall off unless you rubbed them down with my special sauce, you’d call bullshit.  But Al Gore makes himself a PowerPoint presentation and everybody’s bowels explode.

The first motive is money.  Political elites have set up a system in which they control the supply of a commodity THAT DOESN’T EXIST, and then tell you you have to buy it or they’ll fine you and make you buy it anyway.

The second motive is envy.  Pointy-headed intellectuals and politicians who think they’re smarter than everybody else, but who have never created or produced anything in their lives, look at the capitalist system and private sector as cheap and materialistic, but they want a piece of that wealth for themselves.  So they spend their lives tearing them down and enacting public policy that transfers private wealth into their public coffers, so that they can give it to who they believe is more “deserving” of it, people who they “approve” of.

The most important motive is power.  Stripping money and influence and power from individuals and from private organizations and funneling it into community organizations and massive, unaccountable government bureaucracies and labor unions and nationalized industries puts THEM in control of the means of production.  THEY control who gets wealthy, THEY control what gets made, who makes it, how it’s used.

Why are environmentalists and their organizations almost exclusively liberal, if not utterly Marxist?  It’s because they see the environmental cause as a route to the acquisition of power.  They see it as a way to instill fear.  Fear causes people to make bad decisions.  And bad decisions are how free people willingly surrender their individual rights.  If you can get people to believe that the world is coming to an end, that its their fault, that they’re going to lose their jobs and their health care, that bankers and Jews are causing it, and then present them with a clean, articulate, hip black friend who can read a teleprompter like nobody’s business and convince them that he has all the answers to their fears?  It’s like shooting poorly-educated, Obama-voting fish in a barrel.

The only way we can prevent this nightmare scenario from unfolding is to get the Senate to stop it.  If I may be coarse for a moment, call or write your goddamned Senator for once in your life.  They might not listen, particularly if you live in an intellectual wasteland like Washington State, but your conscience will be intact, and you and I can share a beer and a hearty laugh together when the bastards are voted out.

Yours,

kodewords.com

PS  Dave Reichert is a mental midget.  It might have only taken him thirty years to catch the Green River Killer, so kudos for that.  But today we all might as well be dead hookers for all Dave cares.  Screw that guy.