Sunday, October 18, 2009

Reasons 3 and 4 of "10 Reasons To Oppose Cap and Tax"

3. It doesn’t work where it has been tried:
Speaking of Europe, let’s take a closer look at how cap and trade is fairing. As mentioned earlier, the EU is watching carbon emission levels rise despite the fact that they have had a cap and trade system since 2005.

Furthermore, the Heartland Institute reports that 12 of the 15 EU nations taking part in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a program that sets greenhouse gas reduction targets and serves as a precursor to cap and trade, are failing to meet their reduction targets, with three going over by more than 10 percent and another three going over by more than 20 percent.

In fact, emissions for all EU countries went up on average 2.1 percent between 2000 and 2004. Compare this with the United States where currently no such regulatory regime exists and yet emissions went up only 1.3 percent during the same time period. Nonetheless, President Obama has announced an aggressive set of targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promising to “work expeditiously with key stakeholders and the Congress to develop an economy-wide emissions reduction program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions approximately 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and approximately 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.”

4. It will cost Americans jobs:
This calculation is a pretty simple one. For U.S. industry to comply with a cap and trade scheme, they have to reduce their carbon emissions. There are two ways to do this:

(1) produce less – this obviously hurts jobs as companies would seek to streamline their workforce to compensate for a drop in production, or

(2) buy carbon allowances in order to keep production up – this, too, would threaten jobs as companies would be forced to devote more internal resources to allowances, negatively effecting their bottom lines and potentially putting workers on the chopping block.

In either case, the rising costs of energy under a cap and trade system, as mentioned earlier, only add to the problem. An analysis conducted by Charles River Associates in 2007 estimated anywhere from 1.2 million to 2.3 million jobs would be lost under a cap and trade scheme.

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