“The debate over so-called environmental reforms continues to boil away in Washington, despite the fact that health care is still foremost in everyone’s minds. In our nation’s capital, the Cap-and-Trade bill (I call it cap-and-tax), rests in the U.S. Senate. But for how long, who knows?
This legislation would raise the cost of every electric bill in our congressional district, some say a good guess is by an average of 70 percent. Cap-and-Trade is expected to cost our state thousands of jobs every year it is in effect. And literally trillions of dollars in income and productivity would disappear from Missouri. The bill would decimate our economy, plain and simple.
I’ve dug in my heels against Cap-and-Trade, but the bill passed the House of Representatives over the cries of 210 of my colleagues and me. Today, it sits in the Senate, where momentum is slackening as more and more people speak out against the bill. In Missouri, we have a textbook example of how the bill would cripple industry, cost us jobs, and push our family budgets for gas and power to the breaking point.
Most Midwestern states are in the same situation; our economies are primarily based on manufacturing, agriculture and transportation – all energy-intensive businesses. The cap-and-tax would hit us very hard. These same rules don’t raise the cost of doing business very much in, say, San Francisco by comparison, where the most energy used in an office goes for the cappuccino machine.
But as arguments for Cap-and-Trade in the Senate have slowed, the Environmental Protection Agency is picking up speed. The plan at that agency is to put Cap-and-Trade into effect whether we like it or not.
Through a series of new regulatory requirements, the EPA would force power companies and some manufacturers to begin measuring their emissions of greenhouse gases. This entails the purchase of expensive equipment and a mandate to report the results to the federal government. Ostensibly, the data included in those reports would lead to a penalty or a fine in the future. EPA is clearly gearing up to start enforcing energy taxes regardless of whether Congress passes a bill or not.
Our purpose should be two-fold. One, we have to stop congressional action from moving us closer to a Cap-and-Tax scheme. Two, we must curtail the EPA’s effort and authority to nevertheless implement such a measure if my fellow skeptics in Congress and I can get the legislation stopped.
