QOTD

Congressman Joe Barton, R.-Texas, from his May 10th Washington Times op-ed:

The war against global warming evidently starts at home, where President Obama says the price of electricity will "necessarily skyrocket" when the government caps carbon dioxide and issues emissions permits that utilities can buy and sell to one another.

The president and his allies have decided that man-made carbon dioxide is a witch's brew that's killing the planet, and they think that just because the cap-and-trade cure stings doesn't mean we shouldn't have to swallow it.

Their solution is embodied in the momentarily stuck Henry A. Waxman-Edward J. Markey global warming legislation, the goal of which is to banish one of the world's most ubiquitous elements from our lives. Its proponents call it "back to the future." They're not kidding, either.

Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That's the last time Americans' carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation.

What, the old DeLorean is up on cinder blocks in the front yard again? In that case you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO₂ emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America's to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO₂ level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that has actually achieved it is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. So excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Unconvinced? Ask Australia. Or India.