Cap-and-Trade Follow-Up: Democratic Senators Want to Wait

Last night I blogged about the failure of the Australian Senate to pass a cap-and-trade system and predicted that it would spell trouble for senators looking to pass a similar system here. So what headline are we seeing from Bloomberg this morning?

"Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say"
Go figure. Also note the bias in the headline which refers to "U.S. Senators" when the article specifically talks about Democratic senators who are the ones pushing for the delay. Republican senators want it killed completely. See the huge difference there?

The Democratic senators want to push it off because they're concerned that passing cap-and-trade so close to the 2010 elections will hurt their re-election chances, but rest assured that once they have safely won another six years in office they will return once again to their ruinous plans to institute some sort of carbon trading scheme. The only way to actually defeat it, rather than just delay it, is to vote the Democrats out of office completely. They only understand the language of the ballot box, and we should never stop reminding them that we speak it fluently.

2010 Elections, Cap and Trade, Democrats, Congress

Ill Omen For Cap and Trade in the USA

In a sure sign that cap-and-trade is in serious trouble here, the Australian Senate has voted down a cap-and-trade system in their country.

Why does it matter what the Aussies are doing? Because one of the primary arguments for a cap-and-trade system in this country is that everybody else is doing it, and we're not living up to our global responsibilities if we don't. It becomes awfully difficult to make that argument if other countries have already rejected similar schemes themselves.

Australians tilt farther left than Americans do as a whole, and if they can't muster enough to support there then it's highly unlikely that it can be done here either. Much as they did with the Kyoto Treaty which was rejected 95-0 in the Senate while Bill Clinton was still president largely because China and India were exempted, senators are highly unlikely to put businesses in their home states at such a disadvantage to their foreign competitors - especially in a recessionary economy.

Hillary Clinton recently tried to get India to do something about their carbon emissions too, only to be told in no uncertain terms that India wasn't buying:

"There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the
lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions," Ramesh
told Clinton. He asserted that "detailed modeling" showed "unambiguous"
results -- that developing country emissions would remain well below
the averages of developed countries even with high growth rates.

Australians understand that cap-and-trade would be an economy killer for them. Indians get it too. Too bad American Democrats still don't. It's going to be up to the American people to explain it to them in a language they DO understand: beat them at the ballot box. The 2010 election season is coming fast. It's never too early to let your representatives know that we're watching and, unlike their MoveOn.org paper tigers: we vote.

Global Politics, Democrats, Diplomacy, Cap and Trade, 2010 Elections, Enivronmentalism, Global Warming, Foreign Policy, Economy