Obama Faces Chilly Reception to Warming Goals

Friday, October 23, 2009

Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studiespmichaels@cato.org:

President Obama's renewed push for cap-and-trade legislation is absolutely the wrong move at the wrong time, in terms of both policy and politics.

For one thing, lawmakers in his own party won't be able to stomach it at this point. Everybody seems to forget that the ire in town hall meetings over the summer really began over climate policy. There wasn't even a health care bill to be mad about until well into August, and the public was already up in arms over this administration's aggressive and intrusive policy direction. Obama is putting his friends in Congress on a path that will make 1994 seem like a day at the beach.

With Obama's initiatives already having added trillions to our deficit, cap-and-trade would impose an additional cost of over $10 trillion on the U.S. economy. At the same time, it will do nothing about our climate. The president knows that even if every nation that has committed to the Kyoto Protocol adopted cap-and-trade, only 7 percent of the warming predicted by the United Nations would be prevented. The president also knows that planetary temperatures haven't warmed a bit in the last 14 years, and that the extreme forecasts that provide support for extreme legislation are failing, even as he speaks about warming in this very chilly autumn.

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