Global Warming: Destined to be the new 'Bloody Shirt' in American politics

There were 16 presidential elections between 1868 and 1928 and Democrats won in only four of those contests, with only two candidates, Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland. More often, whenever it looked like a Democrat might have a shot at the White House, Republicans would "wave the bloody shirt." End of election story.

Waving the bloody shirt was as easy as GOP party leaders and candidates simply reminding Northern Republican voters that it was the overwhelmingly Democratic South that seceded in 1861 and ignited the Civil War, the most cataclysmic event in the nation's history. For more than half a century, that fact was an unavoidable and impassable obstacle for virtually all Democrats who nurtured dreams of becoming the nation's commander-in-chief.

What does this relic of American political history have to do with contemporary politics and campaigns? Well, the phenomenon is about to be repeated in a sense. The Senate takes up debate when it returns from the Memorial Day recess on S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman bill known as "America's Security Act."

All three remaining presidential candidates support Warner-Lieberman or variations of it and the proposal has generated widespread enthusiasm in the mainstream media and among environmental activists. The proposal would cap the nation's greenhouse gas emissions - mainly carbon dioxide, which allegedly cause global warming - from combustion of petroleum, coal and natural gas from all sources, then set up a complicated system of "credits" that companies would buy and sell.

For example, Company A achieves 120 percent of its assigned emissions reduction but Company B only achieves 80 percent of its goal. Company A would be able to sell a credit for the 20 percent it achieved above its goal to Company B. Vast new layers of federal bureaucracies and regulation would be required to administer and enforce the system.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that, if this proposal for combating global warming somehow becomes law, it would be so disastrous for the nation's economy that only something on the order of a civil war would be worse. It would in short be a new bloody shirt for Republicans to wave against Democrats for decades to come.

The evidence comes from widely divergent sources, including the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, MIT and the Center for Data Analysis (CDA) at The Heritage Foundation. The bill would raise energy taxes more than $1.13 trillion in a decade, according to CBO.

That would translate into gas prices being 42 percent higher by 2020 and the price of electricity being 55 percent higher in 2015, according to MIT. The EPA projects that enactment of Warner-Lieberman would reduce the growth in GDP by as much as 6.9 percent by 2050.

But those numbers barely begin to tell the whole story of what adoption of Warner-Lieberman would mean for working Americans. The econometric model study recently completed by CDA provides a much more detailed look at the economic catastrophe that adoption of Warner-Lieberman. would be.

The CDA study used the Global Insight (GI) econometric model of the national economy and applied assumptions that were highly favorable to the proposal, most notably that an as-yet unproven technology known as "carbon capture and sequestration" would be fully commercialized and available from the outset. The GI model also assumes no major economic dislocations during the period following enactment.

Despite these highly favorable base assumptions, the CDA study notes at the outset of describing the results of its simulations that "since energy is the lifeblood of the American economy, 85 percent of which comes from these fossil fuels, S. 2191 represents an extraordinary level of economic interference by the federal gov­ernment."

In addition, according to the CDA study, Warner-Lieberman "promises extraordinary perils for the American economy. Arbitrary restrictions predicated on multiple, untested, and undeveloped technologies will lead to severe restrictions on energy use and large increases in energy costs. In addition to the direct impact on consumers' budgets, these higher energy costs will spread through the economy and inject unnecessary inefficiencies at virtually every stage of production and consumption--all of which will add yet more financial burdens that must be borne by American taxpayers."

The burdens break out like this, according to the CDA study:

"* Cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses are at least $1.7 trillion and could reach $4.8 tril­lion by 2030 (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
* Single-year GDP losses hit at least $155 billion and realistically could exceed $500 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
* Annual job losses exceed 500,000 before 2030 and could approach 1,000,000.
* The annual cost of emission permits to energy users will be at least $100 billion by 2020 and could exceed $300 billion by 2030 (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
* The average household will pay $467 more each year for its natural gas and electricity (in infla­tion-adjusted 2006 dollars). That means that the average household will spend an additional $8,870 to purchase household energy over the period 2012 through 2030."

If these results from an econometric simulation based upon extremely favorable assumptions produce an outlook that includes a lower standard of living for most Americans, millions of lost jobs and the forced acceptance of countless daily inconveniences, the odds are overwhelming that a more realistic simulation would produce results that are truly nightmarish.

Food will become more costly, people who moved to the suburbs to escape crime and over-crowding will have to move back to the city, commuter congestion will worsen as mass transit is unable to handle significantly increased traffic volumes, productivity will suffer, technological progress will slow or reverse as a result of lost economic opportunities and leverage, the advancement of minorities into the middle class will cease, and social and political conflict and decay will accelerate.

The growing resistance of the generally more sequaious Europeans after only a few years of experiencing an anti-global warming regimen not unlike Warner-Lieberman is a likely harbinger of a far more dramatic response from independent-minded Americans.

It's not a pretty picture of America's future to be sure, but the great irony is that the liberals responsible for creating such an unhappy time then are the same people telling us now that we must turn off the air conditioning, give up our cars and stop eating so much.

In other words, they'll be telling us how happy we ought to be that we've become as miserable, cramped and chained as the rest of the world.

UPDATE: Re-empowering the Left elite

Columnist Charles Krauthammer has a superb piece in today's edition of The Washington Post. The whole column is a must-read but here's the core point that makes it so essential:

"For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

"Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

"Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

"Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

"Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe."

That is exactly the point. It's also why The Examiner published this editorial earlier this week on why environmentalism isn't about the environment, it's about power for the elite.

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