Political reaction yesterday to President Obama’s prime-time Gulf oil spill speech was surprisingly biparti san: Democrats and Republicans alike thought the address was a dud.
Especially when Obama veered from the spill and — in true Rahm Emanuel “never let a crisis go to waste” style — began pitching his energy-regulation scheme.
Which essentially amounts to the discredited notion of cap-and-trade (though Obama, at his pollster’s urging, no longer uses the term, which more accurately should be called cap-and-tax, anyway).
“If my house is on fire, I don’t need the fire chief telling me that I shouldn’t have built the house out of wood,” said Alabama’s GOP Gov. Bob Riley.
Added Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat: “The climate bill isn’t going to stop the oil leak.”
Nor is it even going to meet the nation’s long-term energy needs.
But if cap-and-trade, which passed the House last summer by a razor-thin 219-212 margin, is enacted, it will depress the American economy. Big time.
In broad terms, under cap-and-trade, Washington would raise taxes on individual companies, issuing carbon-emission credits, or caps, in return.
Companies would be free to sell unused credits — or, conversely, buy them.
Washington would then begin to ratchet down the number of credits — sharply reducing allowable carbon-emission levels and dramatically driving up the cost of those that are available.
This is not a prescription for a healthy economy, period — and it would kill in the cradle any economic recovery that might be under way.
Nor would it have any impact on climate — good, bad or otherwise.
The world’s leaders in carbon emission — particularly China, India and Russia — laugh at the notion of cap-and-trade.
Bottom line?
Obama intends that America unilaterally immolate its economy by dramatically and artificially inflating the price of energy in order to force the public to use less of it.
This is what the president alluded to in Tuesday’s speech when he said that “there are costs associated with this transition” to so-called clean energy.
But he didn’t cite any figures — and no surprise there.
His own Treasury Department — in a private analysis last fall that was made public only thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request — concluded that cap-and-trade would cost US taxpayers at least $200 billion a year.
That would cost the average household an extra $1,761 a year — equivalent to a 15 percent hike in personal income taxes.
And that’s just for starters.
The only good news is that, with even his own party decrying Obama’s lack of leadership on the Gulf spill, his prospects of transforming that unhappiness into Senate enthusiasm for cap-and-trade seem remote.
But he’ll try, you can bet on that.
And he must be resisted.
For as economically damaging as the Gulf spill is going to be, cap-and-trade would be infinitely worse.