McCain's Cap Won't Trap

UPDATE: below

Campaigning in Portland Oregon on Monday, Senator John McCain guzzled the climate change Kool-Aid:

Today I'd like to focus on just one of those challenges, and among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all. Whether we call it "climate change" or "global warming," in the end we're all left with the same set of facts. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence, and simple commonsense demand that we to act meet the challenge, and act quickly. . .

We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge. . .

To lead in this effort, however, our government must strike at the source of the problem -- with reforms that only Congress can enact and the president can sign. We know that greenhouse gasses are heavily implicated as a cause of climate change. And we know that among all greenhouse gasses, the worst by far is the carbon-dioxide that results from fossil-fuel combustion. Yet for all the good work of entrepreneurs and inventors in finding cleaner and better technologies, the fundamental incentives of the market are still on the side of carbon-based energy. This has to change before we can make the decisive shift away from fossil fuels.

For the market to do more, government must do more by opening new paths of invention and ingenuity. And we must do this in a way that gives American businesses new incentives and new rewards to seek, instead of just giving them new taxes to pay and new orders to follow. The most direct way to achieve this is through a system that sets clear limits on all greenhouse gases, while also allowing the sale of rights to excess emissions. And this is the proposal I will submit to the Congress if I am elected president -- a cap-and-trade system to change the dynamic of our energy economy.

Cal Thomas's column pronounced: "McCain Joins Global Warming Cult". No word better describes unscientific and un-falsible climate alarmism than "cult". As I've written, and Danish statistician/"skeptical environmentalist" Bjørn Lomborg recently confirmed, every proposed climate "fix" is "unworkable" and costs more than the consequences of warming or abatement and amelioration.

So McCain's plan cannot be justified by logic or economics. Instead, its "cap-and-trade" approach expands "big government" bureaucratic intervention in the energy and manufacturing sectors, and amounts to a back-door tax hike (with pricing "hidden and shifted around"). That is "very hard for conservatives to swallow," as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez neatly captures:



source: Freedom Line

Still, might the scheme merely be a campaign tactic? Perhaps--but the Senator's planetary panacea won't pacify progressives, concludes the Wall Street Journal:

The McCain campaign believes his global-warming plan will appeal to independents and young people, as well as separate the Senator from President Bush.

But he will never be green enough for the climate-change fundamentalists. The Obama campaign and Democrats were already dinging Mr. McCain yesterday for half-measures. His concessions won't help him much in November, but they will make his governing decisions in 2009 that much more difficult if by some chance he does win.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton's reaction (literally before McCain delivered the speech) was: "Senator McCain’s proposal simply does not go far enough." Expect the Dems to paste the plan as "corporate welfare."

Conclusion: McCain and the Republican hierarchy "don't get it." Monday's speech merely alarmed conservatives while appeasing few independents. So much for the Senator's "straight-talk" reputation, says David Limbaugh:

Liberals have denominated McCain a maverick because he has taken so many positions contradictory to his party's platform and to the conservative ideology that undergirds it. Now that he is the putative Republican nominee, you don't hear much about his maverick nature, but it's certainly not because he's changed his ways in opposing his party. . . .

If John McCain were truly a maverick, he would publicly break from the politically correct culture that demands obedience to its global warming narrative. But sadly, he continues to do the opposite.

Simply put, McCain's climate change plan capped the right without trapping the rest.

MORE:

31,072 American scientists John McCain needs to talk to.

(via President 2008, Planet Gore, Michelle Malkin)