Cap and Trade: The Final Pillar

I saw the following video on Kirk Petersen's blog.



The video reminded me of some less entertaining information regarding the hoax that is cap and trade, namely that a Cap and Trade bill is the third (and final) pillar of Obama's three point "blueprint for American Prosperity". (HT: Another Black Conservative)

According to Nanci Pelosi herself, the first two pillars are already in-place: Health Care, and "Education Reform" (the takeover of the student loan industry). Just like all of Obama's policies, it seems that this is yet another hoax designed to put us in chains.

There is a great website out there at www.nocapandtrade.com (the video included the URL) that has some great information, as well as a petition you can sign and send to your Congressmen. I'd urge everyone to sign it.

Destroying Our Future. One Dream at a Time.

I think it's quite possible that pigs may have learned to fly. (And, I'm not referring to aircraft-assisted flight, or to the soaring level of pork under the current Democrat Congress/Administration.) I am referring to the fact that I have finally found an area in which I do not want to see spending cuts: Our space program.

According to Fox News, Obama's spending plan for the coming year freezes NASA's budget at it's current level. While I applaud the new-found spending restraint, this essentially puts the brakes on NASA's Constellation program, which oversees the agency's manned space flight efforts. And while holding the budget at current levels isn't a cut, it amounts to a beheading, as

"The program needs about $3 billion in additional funding annually for the next five years to keep the International Space Station supplied and to create a new generation of spacecraft, according to a commission the president appointed last year."

By failing to give the agency what it needs to continue the program, he's basically cutting the program in its entirety. (Unless, of course, NASA is able to cut enough costs elsewhere to continue the program.)

But is this really the right program to cut? Obama just gave a lacklustre State of the Union address in which he hailed our need to create jobs. But, how many jobs does the program provide? Moreover, these are high-paying jobs that require a high degree of education and specialization. That seems a bit of a hypocrisy, given the daily deluge of Public Service Announcements featuring Obama yapping about how we should "stay in school" to help keep America competitive. Some competition: By cutting this program, NASA will be forced to "outsource space flight to other governments -- such as the Russians." That sounds more like surrender than competition to me.

One may think the decision to cut the program to be simply a practical one: we have to cut somewhere, right? Well, not so fast. In cutting the program,

"...the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on earth science projects -- principally, researching and monitoring climate change..." (emphasis mine)

So now we see the real reason for the decision: Manned space flight doesn't help him advance his political agenda, but climate change does. So, we're trading the hopes and dreams of a nation that was once inspired to put a men on the moon in exchange for the futility of chasing a scientific hoax.

More Evidence: Global Warming is a Hoax

Senate Stooges Boxer and Kerry have unveiled the latest strategy to get the ill-conceived cap and trade bill passed, despite the fact that Obama's Treasury department has concluded that it will cost American households more than $1700 a year! (That's the equivalent of an annual 15% increase in the federal income tax!) So, what's their grand scheme? Change it's name: Instead of calling the legislation "Cap and Trade", they've decided to start calling it "Pollution Reduction and Investment", or PRI. So, we'll just dress it in some new clothes to cover up the smell.

New clothes indeed, considering that Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit presented a recent report which effectively puts to death the famed "hockey stick" graph that is a perennial bad penny that keeps popping up in any climate change discussion. AJ Strata, in his analysis of the findings, is pretty direct in his conclusions:

The real professionals ... have discovered that the source of all the recent global warming is not CO2, but bad data used in climate models which forces the models to show recent warming – where OTHER DATA shows there is no recent warming.

Let me repeat this. The statistical models used by the High Priests of Global Warming are using a newly identified and specific data set which wrongly produces decades of warming where none exists in the raw temperature data 0r other data sets.

...

I will let the authors be more reserved, but I find the results damning. To summarize, the infamous Hockey Stick (HS) warming trend that supposedly shows man made CO2 forcing the Earth’s temperature higher is in fact an artifact of one set of bad data.

These guys are going to have to do more than just give the policy a new name to sell us on it. To paraphrase Shakespeare: "A pile of horse manure by any other name is still just as smelly." It'll take more than just a new name to make this bad policy come up roses.