Last week, we talked about how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has absolutely nothing to do with global warming, despite recent attempts to correlate the two.
To put it lightly, our president is not an economist.
We’ll start with Obama’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, which was issued so his administration would be able to study possible drilling improvements.
United States District Judge Martin Feldman quickly lifted the ban.
There are two reasons why everyone is confused about Obama’s failed moratorium, especially regarding his concern that the United States is addicted to foreign oil.
The first reason is that, considering each idle rig left sitting in the Gulf of Mexico can cost up to $500,000 per day.
According to a 10-K form filed by ExxonMobil on Feb. 26, the company kept an average of 81,440 regular employees for the past five years. If they want to keep a high employment, they’re going to drill somewhere else, and somewhere further from the United States.
The second reason is that Obama doesn’t really seem to hate offshore drilling. He just hates offshore drilling near our country where it’s cheapest for us to obtain.
The administration has agreed to loan $2 billion to Brazil’s semi-nationalized oil company Petrobras in order to support its deeper offshore drilling.
All of these actions make us more dangerously dependent on foreign nations for energy. So let’s get on with cap-and-trade, shall we?
Integrating a system of cap-and-trade is the Cadillac of bad decisions. Obama mentioned Spain’s green economy as a model of what the United States should hope to accomplish with cap-and-trade.
Clearly Spain’s economy is the only thing he has not done a study on, considering the country’s ‘going green’ policy has resulted in an unemployment rate topping 20 percent.
Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, testified before the Senate Republican Conference.
“Overall, Waxman-Markey reduces gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion annually between 2012 and 2035, and cumulatively by $9.4 trillion,” he said. He also found that, by 2035, the costs of electricity will go up by 90 percent, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent, forcing unemployment up by 2,479,000 jobs during peak years.
And all of this, for what? So that Earth’s temperature will reduce by no more than 0.2 degree Celsius by the year 2100. A century’s worth of jobs destroyed. An already disastrous economy made even worse. The awful trade-off speaks for itself, and I’m sure it will easily present itself within the next few decades in the form of a bankrupt United States after our assets are liquidated to pay off our debt to foreign nations.
Our lives will only be made much worse by integrating cap-and-trade when due to a nonexistent link. The system will benefit a few wealthy individuals at the expense of the very freedoms we cherish.
But, then again, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Right, Rahm?
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
View part I of Brian’s “cap-and-slave” series here
