By Timothy Birdnow

Barackenstein’s Cap and Trade, like Mary Shelley’s grotesque monster and even more grotesque scientist, is an abomination that will tear us to shreds in years to come.

In 1816 a young girl, stuck in Geneva due to nasty weather, sat beside a bonfire and told ghost stories. Her husband, a famous writer, and his close friends, also shining literary luminaries, had taken to telling ghost stories late in the evenings as a means of passing the time until the weather broke. This particular night a challenge was issued by someone in the group (Byron); three of the story tellers were to actually write their stories down, then the rest would decide which was best.

That night, Mary Shelley began writing what would become one of the great classics of English literature-Frankenstein. (The weather cleared by the next night and the other contestants abandoned their manuscripts in favor of mountain climbing.) Young Mary, encouraged by her husband Percy (whom many accused of ghost-writing Frankenstein-pardon the pun) developed her short campfire story into a masterpiece about Hubris and the wages of Human Pride.

Frankenstein is about the obsessed scientist, not about the pathetic monster he creates. Viktor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with overcoming death and, in what constitutes classic tragedy, destroys himself through his pride and determination. He creates an abomination from dead body parts, and breathes life into this horror via electric current. Once he has accomplished his goal, he flees in terror from the great evil he has wrought, leaving the monster free to walk the Earth. He, along with everything he cares about, is eventually destroyed by his horrible creation.

Enter the political monster known as The American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Through much arm-twisting and extreme party discipline, Chancy Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Bleat, pushed through the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” anti-global warming bill (HR2454) in the House of Representatives. This crown jewel of the Obama administration and colossal ignorance squeaked to victory by a margin of 219 to 212, with 8 Republicans voting for this unnatural measure. (Mary Bono Mack CA, John McHugh NY, Mike Castle DE, Leonard Lance NJ, Mark Kirk Il, Frank LoBlondo NJ, Chris Smith NJ, and David Reichert Wa round out the list of GOP shame.) It moves on to the Senate where it faces stiff opposition.

Ostensibly intended to fight “global warming” - that chimera of pseudoscience predicted by Frankensteinian computer models and cobbled together by leftists, money-grubbing researchers, environmentalists, and those looking to do the work of “remaking America” - cap-and-trade creates something out of nothing, mainly a “market” for industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. But the emission of C02 is NATURAL, a biproduct of any process involving fire (fire good!) or digestion. Charging people to emit CO is like charging people to use the bathroom; it’s guaranteed to stop said taxee from eating or drinking. By creating “carbon credits” we are backdooring (pardon the pun) restrictions on energy usage. Energy usage is the fundamental yardstick of wealth.

The list of atrocities in this bill is longer than Bill Clinton’s little black book, and House Minority Leader John Boehner pointed out many of the more aggregious aspects (1) I would like to consider just one-the generation of electricity. This whole horror show is a brownout waiting to happen.

According to the bill, carbon dioxide emissions must be cut 17% by 2020 and 83% by 2050. There is also a mandate that by 2012 6% of electricity generated must come from “renewables” such as wind and solar, and that amount rises to 20% by 2020.

But this is exactly what the state of California did during the 1990`s, and the result was the great energy crisis of 2000-2001. California strangled the energy industry with pollution emissions caps and draconian regulation. The so-called “deregulation” of the power companies was one of the greatest farses ever. Consider this description of the alleged deregulation (2).

“Several plants, totalling 2700 MWe, had used up their annual pollution credits so could not restart without severe fines. In particular, three gas-fired plants (2000 MWe) were shut down after the south coast Air Quality Management District required them to install emission control equipment for NOx. As the crisis developed, the state’s Independent System Operator (ISO), which operates most of the state’s power grid, called them back into service, but they were required to obtain NOx emission credits to cover the short-term impact of this. The price of such credits soared.

The shortfall in generating capacity is widely seen as being due to years of weak government appeasing extreme environmentalism. Defending proposals for new plant against advocates of renewables and demand management as being the total answer to provision of power, means that it takes up to seven years in California to turn a proposal into a functioning power station, compared with three years in Texas. This is despite price levels which would enable an operator in Northern California to pay off a new gas-fired power station (@ $600/kW) in a year.

[…]

Before “deregulation” electric utilities, which have a legal obligation to serve their customers’ demands, could build plants regardless of the expense and recover costs from customers. In 1996 utilities owned 81% of the total generating capacity and the average retail price was 9.5 cents/kWh, the tenth highest in USA. This arrangement locked in certain inefficiencies, and when deregulation loomed it raised the question of how utilities would recover their “stranded costs”, mostly the capital component which could not be amortised with expected lower electricity prices. Elaborate mechanisms were put into place to cover these, but there were conditions imposed to ensure that utilities did not exploit the situation.

Under the Electric Utility Industry Restructuring Act in 1996 the Californian government put into place a deregulation scheme sought to bring competition into generation - attracting needed investment, while leaving transmission and distribution as regulated monopolies. This required the major utilities to divest at least half their major generation assets, so that their ownership fell to 46% of the total capacity.

The scheme also prevented them from entering long-term hedging contracts that would limit the risk of large price movements, forced them to buy electricity at market rates from a centralised pool, and on top of all this committed the two main utilities to retailing the electricity at fixed 1996 prices until March 2002 regardless of the cost of wholesale purchase. The price cap provision incorporates a transition charge which is the mechanism for utilities to recover stranded costs.

Thus there was not so much deregulation as a much less effective form of regulation.”

End excerpt

In short, California green dreamin’ turned into a nightmare. This cannot even be attributed to explosive energy demand, because California’s demand grew at a modest 2% annually-something easily dealt with through proper planning (2) and peak demand was not unusual. The brownouts were a result of government policy, plain and simple, and that policy is mirrored by Waxman-Markey.

Barackenstein and his New Prometheans want to bring this monster to life across America-and use the power grid to do it! Their logic consists of the theory that if every power company is in the same boat…

The whole point of this legislation is to drive the price of energy-all energy-through the roof, forcing Americans to use less. But America is a high-tech civilization, and affordable energy is the cornerstone of that technology. Without cheap energy we will be poor and nonproductive. Of course, that may well be what Barackenstein and company ultimately want; a return to the primitive, with America having greater parity with the rest of the world in terms of wealth.

This thing is a monster, stitched together from dead parts by the hand of demented madmen. The advocates of this horrible idea think this will end our “addiction to oil” as if we are somehow chemically dependent on fossil fuels rather than need the energy they produce to continue living a prosperous life.

In the end, this bill does nothing-and I mean nothing-to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or reduce world temperatures. (4) It imposes a scheme that the rest of the world has tried and found wanting (Australia and Japan are ridding themselves of this monster, and Britain is right behind them) and costs the taxpayers approximately four grand a year each-at least 2 trillion bucks-and that`s just for starters. (At least Viktor Frankenstein’s beast was fairly low maintenance in the financial department.)

The American economy is teetering, and the New Prometheans want to bust the bank with this collection of dead tissue. Scientists are jumping off the Global Warming bandwagon at a prodigious rate, more every year, yet we are told by Al Gore and company that the “science is settled”. But the computer models they have given us predict a great many things that have not come to pass-warming in the tropical troposphere, warming of the oceans, warming in the Arctic and Antarctic, more rainfall, etc. These models cannot even be used to predict current conditions from previous data. This is a medicine show.

In the end, Frankenstein’s monster destroyed it’s arrogant maker. Global Warming, that convenient tool for imposing socialism, may do likewise as the monster obliterates the American economy and drives the price of energy beyond the reach of the average American.

It’s alive!

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