Why It Matters

My friends, it is difficult to overstate the profound impact of the Obama Administration’s decision to regulate carbon emissions. This move could have a devastating effect on our standard of living. Yesterday, I noted how environmental regulations in Germany have led to electricity prices that are three times higher than ours and $8.00 a gallon gas. It’s hard to imagine that any politician would think that is a good idea, but that’s exactly what the Left has done in Germany, and that’s exactly what it wants to do here.

Barack Obama said his cap and trade program would bankrupt the coal industry. Well, America gets half of its electricity from coal. (Once Obama bankrupts the coal companies, will they be eligible for a government bailout like GM?) And I suppose it is just a coincidence that President Obama’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, advocated for European-style gasoline taxes just last year, telling the Wall Street Journal in September 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” If higher electricity prices and more pain at the pump aren’t enough, how do you feel about paying twice as much for food?

In June, Robert Zubrin of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies wrote an excellent article on the impact of cap and trade to America’s agriculture industry. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you tax carbon, you tax fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bill’s increased transport costs inflating the burden still more. That’s enough to make many farmers use less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means less food.

“To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer, … go to the supermarket and compare the price of the ‘organic’ produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular produce, which… typically costs less than half as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily pay such high prices for their food — that is their right. But to impose such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather, is self-indulgent in the extreme.”