by Paul Taylor

Created on: January 18, 2009

GOVERNMENT CLIMATE THERMOSTAT

U.S. President Barack Obama's initial agency department secretary nominees for State, Treasury, Defense and Housing and Urban Development were greeted as moderates, or at least familiar Clinton-era casting. However, Obama's nominees for Energy Secretary, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator and his new White House climate policy czar are the sort of green-blooded partisans whose ecopolitics are a threat to America's economic recovery and future prosperity. Obama's more recent nominees for The Department of the Interior Secretary and chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are also climate activists. All would move precipitously to a "cap-and-trade" system where carbon dioxide (CO2) emission credits are bought and sold under government market regulations in pursuit of greenhouse gas reductions and global warming mitigation. Governments actually think that they can use CO2 as a global climate change thermostat.

Cap-and-trade CO2 control systems were first adopted by European Union (EU) countries in the last several years. The theoretical climate benefit of cap-and-trade systems is that by charging companies for the right to emit CO2, the government forces them to switch to low-carbon technologies. Governments would limit ("cap") the amount of CO2 their countries can emit. To meet their carbon reductions, domestic companies have to pay for conversion to low-carbon fuels, and/or install expensive CO2 pollution control equipment, and/or buy annual government permits to exceed CO2 caps at a current rate of about $21 per ton. The EU's cap-and-trade system has so far failed both the environmental goals and the market goals. And more importantly, the actual long-term business costs of cap-and-trade are not known.

Obama's environmental nominees and appointees have a great deal in common. For instance, they share an indifference to the necessary national effort to expand nuclear power plants beyond the 104 plants that presently provide about 18 percent of our electric power. Nuclear power plants emit no greenhouse gases - zero carbon footprint. Yet, Obama's green cabinet is against expansion of carbon-neutral nuclear facilities. As disturbing as the policy positions of Obama's new green regime are the records of such policies. The reflex to impose carbon controls via a cap-and-trade system has a very bad precedent in the European Union's attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate global

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