McCain and Lieberman: the Smoot & Hawley of our generation

[Rule of Reason Blog]

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the post below, I presented the remarks of Czech President Václav Klaus on the alleged threat of global warming. In stark contrast, let's examine John McCain and Joe Lieberman's op-ed today in The Boston Globe. According to McCain and Lieberman (discussing the same report Klaus eviscerates):

There is now a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial's coffin about the problem of global warming.

Pretty good ROI for what Václav Klaus notes is an oversimplified summary for pro-green politicians. That said, McCain and Lieberman note that others have helped with the "final nail" too:

In addition, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has identified a warming climate, and the resulting melting of sea ice, as the reason polar bears may now be threatened as a species. The US Center for Disease Control's National Center for Environmental Health has cited global warming as the largest looming public health challenge we face. And President Bush has himself called global warming a serious challenge that we need to confront.

And how ought we confront this threat? The senators have reintroduced their Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act. According to them:

The bill, which has growing bipartisan support, would harness the power of the free market and the engine of American innovation to reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions substantially enough and quickly enough to forestall catastrophic global warming.

OK, let me get this straight: McCain and Lieberman want to pass a law to let the free market forestall the alleged threat of global warming. Sounds great to me, but that not what their bill actually does. McCain and Lieberman's bill arbitrarily caps off American CO2 emissions at 2000 levels, forces companies to buy and sell the right to emit CO2 gasses into the atmosphere, and treble fines those that exceed their emissions caps. This isn’t the "free market;" it is the antithesis of the free market .

At root, McCain and Lieberman are announcing that they seek to be the Smoot & Hawley of our generation. They seek to choke the life out of the American economy in the name of a sill highly-specious theory—and a theory that's more green dogma than science.

And odds are, they will get their way if we don't begin to act now.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002279.html