By: Patrick O’Connor and Martin Kady II
July 31, 2009  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told colleagues Friday morning that the House will vote today on a measure to transfer $2 billion from the stimulus to replenish the depleted cash-for-clunkers program, which has run out of money in its first week.Under the fast-track bill, Democratic leaders will use funds from a renewable energy loan guarantee included in the stimulus, according to the bill text, obtained by POLITICO.

The bill would extend the program through Sept. 30, 2010. Democrats have portrayed the run on cash for clunkers cash as a great success for the $1 billion program, which allows car owners to turn in older, less fuel efficient cars for a $4,500 rebate to purchase higher gas mileage vehicles.

“Cash for Clunkers may have run out of cash, but America’s consumers haven’t run out of clunkers. We’re going to work with the Obama administration to keep this wildly successful program going until it reaches its goal of helping consumers take 1 million gas guzzlers off the road,” said Rep. Ed. Markey (D-Mass.), who co-authored the legislation.

Republicans have already started objecting to the bill, saying it’s yet another bailout for a specific industry.

“Cash for Clunkers is another example of the government picking winners and losers and enshrines us as a bailout nation,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas). “Almost everyone is hurting in this economy, and sadly for many workers across East Texas and America, Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the largest poultry producers in the country, recently had to file for bankruptcy. Where’s their “Cash for Cluckers” program?”

And one auto industry source said it may pass the House quickly, but senators may want to tweak the bill along the way, which would delay extending the program.

“It will be tough sledding in the Senate, but this would give it considerable momentum,” the auto industry source said. “It’s no new money, so should be more possible to get GOP support.”

When the measure was enacted earlier this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) won assurances from Democratic leaders that any extension would include language to increase the fuel efficiency requirements in new vehicles purchased under the program.

It remains to be seen whether Feinstein, who is working on a proposal with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, can strike an accord with senators from Michigan and other auto states who wanted the more relaxed standards.

Mike Allen and Manu Raju contributed to this story.

Tagged: CARS program, Cash for Clunkers ]]> http://blog.mycountrymatters.com/2009/07/31/house-to-save-cash-for-clunkers/feed/ 0 lokiwhitewood http://blog.mycountrymatters.com/2009/07/11/boxer-faces-challenge-of-a-lifetime-on-climate-change-bill/ http://blog.mycountrymatters.com/2009/07/11/boxer-faces-challenge-of-a-lifetime-on-climate-change-bill/#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:48:02 +0000 Paul Monti http://mycountrymatters.wordpress.com/?p=704 ]]> Monti Says: The nerve of this political hack to try and scare people to favor one of the most dangerous bills in our country’s history. She is a total disgrace along with the people in California who voted for her.

McClatchy Newspapers

Sat Jul 11, 6:00 am ET
By Rob Hotakainen

WASHINGTON — If the Senate doesn’t pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more.
She says there’s a huge upside, however, if the Senate does act: millions of clean-energy jobs, reduced reliance on foreign oil and less pollution for the nation’s children.
Boxer is engaged in her biggest sales job ever. The stakes couldn’t be higher as she faces one of the toughest high-profile acts of her lengthy career: getting Congress to sign off on historic legislation to lower greenhouse-gas emissions.
“For Barbara Boxer , it’s both the opportunity and a challenge of a lifetime,” said Frank O’Donnell , the president of Clean Air Watch .
As the Senate’s top-ranked environmentalist, Boxer heads the influential committee that began hearings on the issue this week. She’s aiming to get her panel to pass a bill by the end of September. For months now, she’s been meeting with senators one on one and hosting a group of about 30 senators for “Tuesday at 12″ meetings to develop a strategy to win 60 votes, enough to overcome a Republican filibuster.
With a House of Representatives bill already approved, all eyes are on Boxer, who must overcome plenty of skepticism on Capitol Hill among her fellow Democrats.
“It’s going to be a tough slog, but I’m excited about it. . . . I know that my Republican colleagues are going to try to do everything to stop it and distort it,” Boxer said Friday in an interview.
Last year, Boxer’s standalone climate-change bill fell to defeat, but there’s a new strategy this year that will make it harder for senators to reject it. Six committees — Environment and Public Works, which Boxer heads, Finance, Commerce, Energy , Agriculture and Foreign Relations — will have jurisdiction over the bill. Those committee heads have been meeting for months with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada , who’ll help combine their work into one massive bill this fall.
Boxer said the approach was unlike any she’d experienced since she joined the Senate in 1993, and she predicted that it will simplify passage.
“It’s a different dynamic, and it will make it easier,” she said in the interview. “There will be so much in this bill. There will be investments in transportation. There will be great opportunities for agriculture. There will be great incentives for energy efficiency. There will be so much in there. There will be help for areas that need flood control. It should have a broader appeal. Having said that, it’s all difficult.”
While vote counts vary, most observers say that the bill’s fate will lie with 15 or so Democratic moderates, many of whom fear that a vote for climate-change legislation could hurt their re-election chances. Boxer is trying to round up some Republican votes to offset opposition from the likes of Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska .
Boxer has been telling audiences for years that Congress must act, and that it will. After years of battling with the Bush administration, Boxer figures she has the best odds ever of getting a bill signed into law.
It still won’t be easy, however.
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma , the top-ranked Republican on the environment committee, predicts that Boxer will fail. He said the public would see the legislation as a large tax increase once people understood that they’d ultimately bear the costs of any bill that forced companies to reduce global-warming emissions.
“Once the American public realizes what this legislation will do to their wallets, they will resoundly reject it,” Inhofe said Tuesday at a hearing.
Boxer said the legislation wouldn’t include any new taxes, and she’s portraying Republican opponents as obstructionists.
“This is consistent with a pattern of ‘No. No, we can’t. No, we won’t,’ ” Boxer said. “I believe that this committee, when the votes are eventually taken on our bill, will reflect our president’s attitude, which is ‘Yes, we can, and yes, we will.’ “
Aides say that Boxer, who’s spent her political career focused on environmental issues, is keenly aware that this is her big moment, a chance to cement a legacy that would include passage of legislation with a worldwide impact. Three more committee hearings are set for next week, and a vote by the full Senate could come as early as October.
Boxer has been working closely with top White House aides and Reid, a close ally, to figure out a way to pass the bill. To reach out to farm-state and coal-state senators, she’s enlisted a team of lieutenants: Democratic Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts , Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota , Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Thomas Carper of Delaware , among others.
While Boxer has yet to introduce specifics of her bill, it’s expected to build on a House plan that was approved 219-212 last month, which would set the first enforceable limits on global warming pollution. The cap on emissions would reduce them by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. Among other things, it also would require that the nation get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable energy in 2020 and set energy-saving standards for buildings, appliances and industries.
The Obama administration is expected to lobby hard on Boxer’s behalf, as was evidenced by this week’s hearings. The administration sent four of its top-level appointees to make the case for the bill: Energy Secretary Steven Chu , Interior Secretary Ken Salazar , Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Lisa Jackson , the head of the Environmental Protection Agency .
Boxer has plenty of support from most environmental groups, but she’s bound to feel the heat as she begins compromising to win votes. Greenpeace , for example, and others opposed the House bill, saying that it had been weakened too much to appease farm-state interests.
O’Donnell said that Boxer would face those same pressures.
“That is going to be one of the real challenges for Boxer,” he said. “How do you ensure the integrity of the program while bringing along farm-state senators to your side?”

The last line say’s it all:  “Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers’ admiration for the pursuit of each individual’s own happiness.”

July 1, 2009 

By Keith Lockitch

Every investment prospectus warns that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” But suppose that an investment professional’s record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?

Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.

Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth’s resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” 

But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food. 

The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.

Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of “tampering” with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was “capable of striking back in unexpected ways” unless people showed more “humility before [its] vast forces.” She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.

Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful “solutions.”

Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.

But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the “solutions” drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland.  Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.

Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world’s energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.

Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don’t we learn from past experience?  Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?

It’s not that we’re too stupid to learn, it’s that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality.  Americans are the most successful individuals in history – even in spite of this economic downturn – in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness–that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.

Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.

It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.

Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers’ admiration for the pursuit of each individual’s own happiness.

**************

Keith Lockitch,  PhD in physics, is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on science and environmentalism.

By Ronald D. White

July 4, 2009

A year after oil hit a record closing price, the commodity’s price is way down — and may fall significantly further as supply continues to dwarf demand.

Downward pressure on oil prices is so great that crude could trade for as little as $20 a barrel by the end of the year — less than a third of what it traded for this week and an 86% drop from its peak last year, analysts said.

That could push gasoline prices back down to $2 a gallon, prices last seen this March after last fall’s slide slammed retail gasoline to its lowest value in four years.

The reasons are simple, said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an expert on energy markets at the University of Calgary in Canada: The still-sputtering economy has lessened demand at a time when there is already a big surplus of oil.

For eight straight months, oil supplies have been running about 2 million barrels a day higher than the global demand of 83 million barrels a day, Verleger said. Eventually, he and others predicted, suppliers will tire of paying to store all of the surplus oil and flood the market.

“That is the largest and longest continuous glut of supply that I have seen in 30 years of following energy prices,” Verleger said. “It’s a huge surplus. There has never been anything like it.”

The market will eventually correct itself, pushing prices down, Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst for Oppenheimer & Co., wrote in a note to investors. “Excessive speculation and a weak dollar have lifted oil prices to levels not sustainable by market fundamentals,” Gheit wrote.

Crude has traded in the range of about $70 a barrel for much of the last month, closing Thursday at $66.73. The markets were closed Friday.

With so much oil available and so little need for that amount, investors, oil companies and even some banks have bought and stored surplus oil everywhere they can. By one estimate, before oil surged to its high this year of $73.38 a barrel in June, as many as 67 supertankers — each capable of carrying 2 million barrels of oil — were being used as floating storage.

Verleger said it represented a largely risk-free investment for those who could sell that oil for huge profits on the futures markets.

But the glut has gone on for so long, he said, that the cost of all of that storage is bound to rise. When it rises enough, some suppliers will refuse to pay and a lot of that oil will be dumped onto the market.

“Oil will drop to $20 a barrel by the end of the year because this situation just cannot be sustained,” Verleger said.

Bob van der Valk, a fuel price analyst, predicted that oil would drop to $40 by the end of the year and that Californians would be paying about $2 a gallon for regular gasoline.

“In normal years you have seasonally adjusted pricing, and 2009 is looking like our first normal year since 2006,” Van der Valk said. “By year’s end, oil and gasoline will be coming down.”

That would be a result similar to 2008, when crude oil futures went from their highest close of $145.29 a barrel last July 3 to less than $34 a barrel in December, and gasoline prices dropped accordingly.

Other analysts said such thinking was premature.

Phil Flynn, vice president and senior market analyst for Alaron Trading Co., said the real test would be in the coming weeks, when oil’s direction would become clearer.

“It’s too soon to say that a correction is about to occur,” Flynn said.

Rep. Kaptur gets $3.5 billion sweetener in climate bill

The Washington Times
By Edward Felker
July 1, 2009

When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.

They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted – a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state’s Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, included the Kaptur project in a 310-page amendment to the legislation unveiled at 3 a.m. Friday, just hours before the bill was to be debated on the House floor. The amendment was packed with other vote-getting provisions, both large and small, that had been sought by dozens of wavering Democrats.

The wheeling and dealing proved successful. Mr. Waxman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, backed by the personal lobbying of President Obama, won over enough lawmakers to pass the bill narrowly Friday evening, 219-212.
Miss Kaptur trumpeted her handiwork on her congressional Web site. She said the new federal authority would bring new economic development to Ohio and the struggling Great Lakes region and would also ensure “regional equity” with other parts of the country that already have such programs.

“The federal government has been subsidizing infrastructure and economic development in other parts of the country since the New Deal. Now, it’s our turn,” she said. “With the Midwest taking the brunt of the economic crisis, my priority was to bring our region additional tools to create jobs and promote energy independence.”

Her spokesman, Steve Fought, said Miss Kaptur modeled the fund after Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus package, which gave similar-sized pots of money to the Western Area Power Administration and the Bonneville Power Administration. Those two Department of Energy administrations serve the Far West and the Western Plains states by issuing similar kinds ofloans.

The provision empowers the Energy and Commerce departments to recommend to Congress the final structure of the new federal lending authority. In the meantime, the provision authorized $25 million in startup money in 2010.

Miss Kaptur saw the struggling climate-change bill as a vehicle that was strong enough to carry the project into law.

“When she saw this coming down the pike, she saw an opportunity to attach something she’s kicked around for a long time,” Mr. Fought said. The inclusion of the program in the legislation, he added, “made it possible for her to entertain voting for the bill.”

In the end, Miss Kaptur, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and the House Budget Committee, was among a minority of Midwestern and Southern Democrats to vote for the bill. “It was not the factor, but a factor, in her decision to vote for the bill,” Mr. Fought said.

Although the program would benefit his home state, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, also of Ohio, criticized the provision during a more-than-hourlong speech Friday evening. He said an Ohio-based power authority was unneeded because electricity already flows well through Ohio without a new federal power authority.

“We do it today,” he said. “We are doing it already.”

Whether the plan becomes law now depends on the Senate, which has yet to adopt the provision. No companion proposal was included in the energy bill that passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently, and the full chamber has yet to begin writing climate-change legislation.

Many of the details of the authority would be determined by the Energy Department. It would be the first new federal power administration created since 1977, when the Western regional power authority began operating.

Americans have mixed feelings about the historic climate change bill that passed the House on Friday, but 42% say it will hurt the U.S. economy.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 19% believe the climate change bill passed by the House on Friday will help the economy. Fifteen percent (15%) say it will have no impact, and 24% are not sure.
A majority of both Republicans (56%) and adults not affiliated with either major political party (52%) think the bill will hurt the economy. Among Democrats, however, 30% say it will help the economy, 23% that it will hurt and 21% say it will have no impact.
Forty-seven percent (47%) of investors say the bill is bad for the economy, compared to 37% of non-investors.
The divide on the question between populist or Mainstream America and the Political Class is a wide one. Fifty percent (50%) of Mainstream Americans say the climate control measure will hurt the economy, but two-thirds of the Political Class (67%) say it will help.
As for the bill itself, 37% of all Americans at least somewhat favor it, while 41% are at least somewhat opposed to it. Twenty-two percent (22%) are not sure what to make of it.
But there’s more intensity on the “no” side: Only 12% strongly favor the measure, but more than twice as many (25%) strongly oppose it.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter.
Under strong pressure from the Democratic congressional leadership, the House on Friday passed a bill aimed at reducing heat-trapping gases that some scientists say cause global warming. The bill, which includes a so-called “cap and trade” plan, is expected to drive up the cost of traditional sources of energy, thus forcing utilities to find alternative energy sources. The bill, according to the New York Times, “could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.”
The bill passed by a 219 to 212 vote, with 44 Democrats against it, and is expected to face tougher going in the Senate, despite Democratic control of that chamber as well. The measure has little Republican support because of questions about the science behind it and the potential cost.
Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats at least somewhat support the bill, compared to 18% of Republicans and 24% of unaffiliated adults. While 20% of Democrats strongly favor the bill, 37% of Republicans and 38% of unaffiliateds strongly oppose it.
Nearly half the Political Class (48%) strongly favors the climate control measure versus 33% of Mainstream America who strongly oppose it.
Most Americans (52%) say they have been following news reports about the bill at least somewhat closely, with 22% who are following very closely. Eleven percent (11%) are not following at all.
In May, just 24% of voters could correctly identify the “cap-and-trade” plan as something that deals with environmental issues.
Forty percent (40%) of U.S. voters say global warming is a very serious problem, but voters are closely divided over whether it is caused by human activity or long-term planetary trends. In recent months, voters have been trending away from the idea that humans are to blame.
At least three-out-of-five voters have consistently said that developing new sources of energy is more important than reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume.
Voters rank development of new energy sources as third among the four top priorities President Obama listed in February, but, along with health care reform, it’s the goal voters think he is most likely to achieve.
Forty-two percent (42%) of voters believe that major lifestyle changes are needed to save the environment, but 44% disagree.

LONDON (Dow Jones)–

Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB.LN) Monday said it was shutting down some output following an attack claimed by militants, days after the country’s president offered an amnesty to the gunmen.

Photo by John Wilcox

Recession-tapped drivers trying to decide whether to keep repairing their old jalopies or invest in new wheels will have some options this summer, thanks to a federal program.

The “cash for clunkers” bill – signed last week by President Obama – may make sense for many owners whose cars are worth under $4,500.

Under the program, Americans will be able to trade in an old car built after 1984 that gets less than 18 miles per gallon for a new, fuel-efficient one, and receive a $3,500 or $4,500 voucher – more money for more fuel efficiency. The new car must be valued under $45,000, be insured and operated by the buyer for at least one year, and get at least 4 miles per gallon more than the old one, which will be crushed.

The program has three goals: Get gas guzzlers off the road, prop up the struggling auto industry and aid consumers.

Combined with manufacturers’ incentives and a sales-tax deduction created earlier this year, this is “an excellent opportunity to put a new car purchase in the reach of many families,” said National Automobile Dealers Association spokesman Bailey Wood.

The program – officially called the Car Allowance Rebate System – was intended to run July 1 through Nov. 1, but dealers won’t be offering the discounts until the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issues guidelines, which may be as late as July 24.

But some cash-strapped owners may want to continue patching up their clunkers. Experts say a general rule of thumb is that if the cost to fix your car is less than 25 percent of its total Blue Book value, it is still worth repairing.

And many owners are investing in maintenance.

“People are putting money into their old cars, keeping them on the road,” said John Murphy, a mechanic at West Cork Auto in Jamaica Plain.

A few simple tips can keep a junker running. Murphy recommends keeping all fluids topped off and tires properly inflated.

“As long as your engine and transmission are in good shape and it’s inspection worthy – there are no rust holes in the body – you should be able to keep a car running as long as you’d like,” he said.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1181675

Americans boycotting Citgo stations

By Warner Todd Huston Sunday, June 28, 2009

A smart gas station owner from Wadsworth, Illinois has given up his Citgo franchise and re-opened as a Shell station. To celebrate he posted a sign that gives Hugo Chavez a wonderful sendoff. “Adios Chavez,” it reads.

For the last five years I have personally boycotted any Citgo gas station. Citgo, you see, is wholly owned by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., which itself is wholly owned by Venezuela’s despotic President Hugo Chavez and his puppet government. I have written several times in the past about this fact (here, and here) and have wondered why more Americans haven’t talked about boycotting this foreign hatemonger’s gas stations?

After all, Hugo Chavez has called the U.S. any manner of names and has centered the U.S. as the chief villain of his paranoid delusions of persecution anyway, so why not let him stew by refusing to do business with this half-witted, half-pint dictator?

So, today I am happy to report that Randy Whitmore’s gas station at Delany and York House roads in Wadsworth, Illinois has done just that. He’s flipped the tin-potted Chavez the bird and gone back to being a Shell man.

Whitmore joins two other stations in northern Illinois that have gone from Citgo to Shell, one in Mundelein and one in Libertyville, both near suburbs to Chicago.

Good on these three stations for dumping a brand owned by an enemy and good for them not doing business that benefits our self-professed enemy, Hugo Chavez. Now, let’s hope more Americans boycott the remaining Citgo stations causing others to make the switch.

And for those of you whining that we are only hurting the American businessmen that own these locally owned stations, I say you are darn right we are. Maybe if they hurt enough, they will do business with a respectable franchise and stop aiding and abetting our enemies. Such putatively American businessmen deserve to be hurt.

When asked why he read portions of the cap-and-trade bill on the floor Friday night, Boehner told The Hill, “Hey, people deserve to know what’s in this pile of s–t.”

Using his privilege as leader to speak for an unlimited time on the House floor, Boehner spent an hour reading from the 1200-plus page bill that was amended 20 hours before the lower chamber voted 219-212 to approve it.

Eight Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the bill; 44 House Democrats voted against it.
Pelosi’s office declined to comment on Boehner’s jab. But one Democratic aide quipped, “What do you expect from a guy who thinks global warming is caused by cow manure?”

Even though Sen. Majorty Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) holds the bill’s fate in his hands, House Republicans intend to hammer Speaker Pelosi’s signature climate-change measure over recess.

And GOP Conference Chairman Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) said “we have only just begun to fight” as he left the Capitol Friday night.

Pence encouraged GOP rank-and-file lawmakers to hold energy summits in their districts over the Independence Day recess. In the recess packets sent home with members, he even included directions on how to organize energy summits.

The goal of holding an energy forum is to “educate your constituents about the Democrats’ national energy tax legislation and let them know what ‘all of the above’ solution you support.”

“All of the above” solution is a reference to the Republicans’ plan that would increase the use of and exploration for domestic energy supplies.

Further, officials with the House GOP’s campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, confirm that they will run with paid media over recess in districts of conservative Dems who voted for the bill. The official would not reveal details on the ad buys at this time.

One Democrat was upset that his leaders would needlessly force vulnerable Dems to vote for a bill that will come back to haunt them. Mississippi Rep. Gene Taylor (D) voted against the measure that he says will die in the Senate.

“A lot of people walked the plank on a bill that will never become law,” Taylor told The Hill after the gavel came down.

Mary Bono                   California                              202-225-5330
Mike Castle                 Delaware                               202-225-4165
Mark Kirk                    Illinois                                   202-225-4835
Frank Lobiondo          New Jersey                           202-225-6572
Leonard Lance             New Jersey                           202-225-5361
Chris Smith                  New Jersey                           202-225-3765
John McHugh               New York                             202-225-4611
Dave Reichert              Washington State                202-225-7761

Notice half of them are from New Jersey and New York.   These people could be the reason why your energy costs could sky rocket and American jobs be lost because of this irresponsible legislation.

Contact them and ask why don’t they think our country matters. Above all, remember them in the voting booth when they run for re-election.

by Ben Lieberman

Testimony before the
Senate Republican Conference

June 22, 2009

My name is Ben Lieberman, and I am the Senior Policy Analyst for Energy and Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

I would like to thank the Senate Republican Conference for extending me the privilege of participating in today’s hearing. I’ll be discussing the costs of the cap-and-trade approach to addressing global warming and The Heritage Foundation’s economic analysis of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Waxman-Markey). As you know, the House is currently considering this bill, which is similar to but has more stringent targets and timetables than the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill that was rejected by the Senate last June.

It is clear that cap-and-trade is very expensive and amounts to nothing more than an energy tax in disguise. After all, when you sweep aside all the complexities of how cap and trade operates–and make no mistake, this is the most convoluted attempt at economic central planning this nation has ever attempted–the bottom line is that cap and trade works by raising the cost of energy high enough so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less of it. Inflicting economic pain is what this is all about. That is how the ever-tightening emissions targets will be met.

The only entities directly regulated by Waxman-Markey would be the electric utilities, oil refiners, natural gas producers, and some manufacturers that produce energy on site. So, the good news for the rest of us–homeowners, car owners, small-business owners, farmers–is that we won’t be directly regulated under this bill. The bad news is that nearly all the costs will get passed on to us anyway.

What are those costs? According to the analysis we conducted at The Heritage Foundation, which is attached to my written statement, the higher energy costs kick in as soon as the bill’s provisions take effect in 2012. For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.

Beyond the cost impact on individuals and households, Waxman-Markey also affects employment, and especially employment in the manufacturing sector. We estimate job losses averaging 1,145,000 at any given time from 2012-2035. And note that those are net job losses, after the much-hyped green jobs are taken into account. Some of the lost jobs will be destroyed entirely, while others will be outsourced to nations like China and India that have repeatedly stated that they’ll never hamper their own economic growth with energy-cost boosting global warming measures like Waxman-Markey.

Since farming is energy intensive, that sector will be particularly hard-hit. Higher gasoline and diesel fuel costs, higher electricity costs, and higher natural gas-derived fertilizer costs all erode farm profits, which are expected to drop by 28 percent in 2012 and average 57 percent lower through 2035. As with American manufacturers, Waxman-Markey also puts American farmers at a global disadvantage, as other food-exporting nations would have no comparable energy-price raising measures in place.

Overall, Waxman-Markey reduces gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion annually between 2012 and 2035, and cumulatively by $9.4 trillion. In other words, the nation will be $9.4 trillion poorer with Waxman-Markey than without it.

It should also be noted that the costs are not distributed evenly. Low-income households spend a disproportionate share of their incomes on energy, and thus would be hit harder than average by Waxman-Markey. Of course, the bill has provisions to give back some revenues to low-income households, but it is likely that these rebates will amount only to some portion of each dollar that was taken away from them in the first place in the form of higher energy costs and higher costs for other goods and services. Waxman-Markey also disproportionately burdens those states, especially in the Midwest and South, that still have a substantial number of manufacturing jobs to lose, as well as those that rely more heavily than others on coal for electric generation. In addition, because the bill raises energy costs, it hurts rural America much more than urban America. Rural Americans, farmers and non-farmers, spend an average of 58 percent more on energy as a percentage of income than their urban counterparts, and those costs would go up.

In conclusion, it’s not surprising that support for Waxman-Markey is heaviest in those parts of the country, the urban centers in the West Coast and Northeast, that are least harmed by it. Even there, the economic damage would be bad enough, but the citizens in the rest of the country and their representatives should really be asking many tough questions about the economic impact of cap and trade. Thank you.