Posted July 4, 200915 yr Buzz Aldrin calls for manned flight to Mars to overcome global problems The NASA astronaut Buzz Adrin has called for the world to press on with establishing a human settlement on Mars to offer the younger generation much-needed objectives. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent Published: 4:35PM BST 03 Jul 2009 The second person to walk on the moon said that setting up habitation on the surface of the red planet was a "wonderful objective" for humanity. Given the backdrop of the ailing world economy, space exploration could offer younger generations much-needed goals, the 79-year-old said. "America helped to take the world to the moon 40 years ago and America certainly can help lead the world in the direction of Mars." After he entered the history books Dr Aldrin said he struggled through a dark time during which he did not know what he should be doing with his life. He battled depression and alcoholism, but has now been sober for 30 years and married to his wife Lois for 23 years. The former astronaut said he was aware he had a unique perspective on the universe and had tried to share this with others. "Not that many people have been on the moon and that's why I have written two children's books and I am involved in modern communication with a website and Twitter," he said. "I try and communicate with people - recently I got together with a few experts and did a rap session that you can download." But while trying to spread the word about the possibilities of space, Dr Aldrin said he was sceptical of climate change theories. "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years," he said. "If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favour of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today. "I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it." Dr Aldrin was in London to promote the publication of his memoirs Magnificent Desolation - a title taken from his comment when setting foot on the moon: "Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation." The world watched the astronaut and his mission commander Neil Armstrong become the first humans to walk on the moon on July 20, 1960, as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Buzz Aldrin is ten times more intelligent than Obama and Gore- check out his background. Funny how all of these experts and scientists don't even believe in Global Warming yet we are spending BILLIONS on it. It would be nice to get more balance from the U.S. media instead of just PRO-Global Warming BS 24-7. His background- Buzz Aldrin was born in Montclair, New Jersey on January 20, 1930. His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army Chaplain. His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was a Colonel in the Air Force, a ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an aviation pioneer. Buzz was educated at the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating third in his class with a BS in mechanical engineering. He then joined the Air Force where he flew F86 Sabre Jets in 66 combat missions in Korea, shot down two MIG-15's, and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross. After a tour of duty in Germany flying F100's, he went on to earn his Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT and wrote his thesis on Manned Orbital Rendezvous. Selected by NASA in 1963 into the third group of astronauts, Aldrin was the first with a doctorate and became known as "Dr. Rendezvous." The docking and rendezvous techniques he devised for spacecraft in Earth and lunar orbit became critical to the success of the Gemini and Apollo programs, and are still used today. He also pioneered underwater training techniques, as a substitute for zero gravity flights, to simulate spacewalking. In 1966 on the Gemini 12 orbital mission, Buzz performed the world's first successful spacewalk, overcoming prior difficulties experienced by Americans and Russians during extra-vehicular activity (EVA), and setting a new EVA record of 5 ½ hours. On July 20, 1969, Buzz and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. They spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned with 46 pounds of moon rocks. An estimated 600 million people - the world's largest television audience in history - witnessed this unprecedented heroic endeavor. Upon returning from the moon, Buzz was decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American peacetime award. A 45-day international goodwill tour followed, where he received numerous distinguished awards and medals from 23 other countries. Named after Buzz are Asteroid "6470 Aldrin" and the "Aldrin Crater" on the moon. Buzz and his Apollo 11 crew have four "stars" on each corner of Hollywood and Vine streets on the renowned Hollywood Walk of Fame. Since retiring from NASA and the Air Force, Col. Aldrin has remained at the forefront of efforts to ensure America's continued leadership in human space exploration. He devised a master plan for missions to Mars known as the "Aldrin Mars Cycler" - a spacecraft system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Dr. Aldrin has received three US patents for his schematics of a modular space station, Starbooster reusable rockets, and multi-crew modules for space flight. He founded Starcraft Boosters, Inc., a rocket design company, and the ShareSpace Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to advancing space education, exploration and affordable space flight experiences for all. Buzz also promotes his Rocket Hero brand launched in 2008 through his newest entity, StarBuzz LLC. Dr. Aldrin has penned his dramatic memoirs in a new autobiography due out in 2009. He continues to inspire today's youth with his illustrated children's books: Reaching for the Moon, a New York Times best-seller, and his latest, Look to the Stars, a 2009 release. He has also authored two space science-fact-fiction novels: The Return and Encounter with Tiber. His non-fiction works include the best-seller historical documentary, Men from Earth, and an early 1970's autobiography, Return to Earth. On Valentine's Day 1988, Buzz married Lois Driggs of Phoenix, Arizona. She is a Stanford University graduate, an active community leader in Southern California and Co-Chairman of StarBuzz Enterprises. Their combined family includes six adult children from previous marriages and one grandson. Sharing a similar passion for adventure, their worldwide business travels include leisure time ocean scuba diving and winter mountain skiing. As one of the leading space exploration advocates, Buzz continues to chart a course for future space travel from Planet Earth to the moon and on to the stars. What's Obama's background?
July 4, 200915 yr So we shouldnt deplete our resources for global warming, but we should try to get man on mars, which would also be an exhaustively expensive goal that would certainly have less of a positive outcome than the possible outcome from trying to battle gw. I'm sure he's very intelligent, but that doesn't do much for me.
July 5, 200915 yr So we shouldnt deplete our resources for global warming, but we should try to get man on mars, which would also be an exhaustively expensive goal that would certainly have less of a positive outcome than the possible outcome from trying to battle gw. I'm sure he's very intelligent, but that doesn't do much for me. Neither is worth pursuing.
July 5, 200915 yr So we shouldnt deplete our resources for global warming, but we should try to get man on mars, which would also be an exhaustively expensive goal that would certainly have less of a positive outcome than the possible outcome from trying to battle gw. I'm sure he's very intelligent, but that doesn't do much for me. Neither is worth pursuing. I think this was my point.
July 5, 200915 yr Your argument was that if we were to spend a massive amount of money it should go towards global warming. My point was that neither global warming nor manned missions to Mars are worth spending money on.
July 5, 200915 yr Your argument was that if we were to spend a massive amount of money it should go towards global warming. My point was that neither global warming nor manned missions to Mars are worth spending money on. I think I wanted to make the point that neither is a good usage of money, but the potential benefits of one are greater than the other.
July 5, 200915 yr Here is an outstanding article from a couple of days ago that attempts to assess the economic consequences that this climate legislation will have upon the costs of goods and energy. These costs will inevitably affect everyone on the planet, if this bill passes the Senate and Obama signs it into law. I really recommend reading it in order to gain some perspective as to why so many of us are vehemently opposed to these new measures. The Costs of the Cap-and-Trade Bill July 1, 2009, 9:45 a.m. By Robert Zubrin Special to Roll Call On June 25, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate stabilization act, which would institute a cap-and-trade system to restrict Americans’ carbon emissions. While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere. To understand this, it is only necessary to look at the numbers. According to a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in April, by 2015 the price of carbon emission indulgences required by the bill for industries to operate could be expected to run between $13 and $17 per ton of CO2 emitted. It may be noted that this estimate was made by an Obama administration agency highly favorable to the bill and that it did not take into account the very real possibility that speculators might act aggressively to buy up all the available indulgences and then, acting like ticket scalpers, force industrial users to purchase them at greatly inflated prices. So these EPA figures for carbon emission costs should be viewed as minimal. That said, let’s stipulate the $15/ton midrange of the EPA estimate, and see what it implies. The United States emits about 9 billion tons of CO2 per year. Therefore, at a rate of $15/ton fee for emission indulgences, the bill would impose a tax of $135 billion per year on the nation. Divided by the U.S. population of 300 million, that works out to a cost of $450 per year levied on every American man, woman or child, or $1,800 for a family of four. While for wealthy individuals like Al Gore such an impost might represent a mere pittance, for working families struggling hard to make ends meet it would be a very significant burden. But that is not even the worst part of it. As a result of the markup of carbon costs, a lot of those working families will be out of work and unable to pay their existing bills, let alone new ones. Consider: Burning one ton of coal produces about three tons of CO2. So a tax of $15 per ton of CO2 emitted is equivalent to a tax of $45/ton on coal. The price of Eastern anthracite coal runs in the neighborhood of $45/ton, so under the proposed system, such coal would be taxed at a rate of about 100 percent. The price of Western bituminous coal is currently about $12/ton. This coal would therefore be taxed at a rate of almost 400 percent. Coal provides half of America’s electricity, so such extraordinary imposts could easily double the electric bills paid by consumers and businesses across half the nation. In addition, many businesses, such as the metals and chemical industries, use a great deal of coal directly. By doubling or potentially even quadrupling the cost of their most basic feedstock, the cap-and-trade system’s indulgence fees could make many such businesses uncompetitive and ultimately throw millions of working men and women onto the unemployment lines. A gallon of petroleum-derived liquid fuel produces about 20 pounds, or 1 percent of a ton, of CO2 when burned. But it takes about 1.5 gallons of oil to produce one gallon of refined liquid fuel. So a $15/ton tax on CO2 emissions will also cause an increase in the price of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on the order of $0.22/gallon. This will not only hit consumers’ pockets, but increase transport costs throughout the economy, thereby disabling businesses and increasing unemployment levels still more. While harming the economy, such a gas tax will do nothing material toward the truly essential goal of decreasing America’s dependence on foreign oil. Indeed, the bill’s dramatic hikes in electricity costs will have the opposite effect, since only 3 percent of America’s electricity is derived from oil, and by forcefully increasing electric power costs, the bill will actually discourage adoption of electric means of transport, including mass-transit systems today and potentially plug-in hybrid cars in the future. America’s dependence on foreign oil could be substantially relieved by legislation requiring that new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled and thus able to run equally well on alcohol fuels derived from a multitude of nonpetroleum sources, but the bill’s provisions in this area are so weak as to be worthless. But all these bad aspects of the Waxman-Markey bill pale before its potential impact on the world’s food supply. America’s agricultural sector is one of the greatest success stories in human history. In 1930, hunger still stalked the entire globe. Not just in Africa, India and China, but even in Europe and America, the struggle to simply get enough food to live on still preoccupied billions of people. Since 1930, the world population has tripled. But instead of going hungrier, people nearly everywhere are now eating much better. This miracle is the work of American farmers, who have not only produced huge surpluses to feed the world, but used the income gained from such good work to pioneer ever more advanced techniques that have enabled farmers everywhere to grow more. This progress is still continuing. In 2007, Iowa alone produced more corn than the entire United States did in 1947, and the 300,000 American corn growers as a whole produced 784 billion pounds of corn, an amount sufficient to supply 130 pounds of corn per year to every person on the planet. But this miracle depends upon the availability of cheap fertilizer and pesticides, which in turn require carbon-based process energy to produce. If you tax carbon, you tax fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bill’s increased transport costs inflating the burden still more. That’s enough to make many farmers use less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means less food. To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer, it is only necessary to go to the supermarket and compare the price of the “organic� produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular produce, which, while just as nutritious, typically costs less than half as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily pay such high prices for their food — that is their right. But to impose such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather, is self-indulgent in the extreme. In the 220 years of our republic, there may have been worse pieces of legislation enacted by Congress than the Waxman-Markey bill, but none readily comes to mind. The Senate needs to take a stand and stop this disastrous act from passing into law. c/o rollcall.com . :lol Woah. Wait a second here. You call this an outstanding article. It's poorly constructed gibberish. Talks about only the costs. What about the benefits? Like the money that will go lower and middle income people to help off-set the cost, just to name one. And then the writer goes on to indulge in some nonsense scare tactics that we're all gonna' be paying much more for food, which will be scarce, because of a $60 per ton increase in fertilizer costs. Fertilizer costs about $1,000 per ton. This is a garbage article. Did you research who the author is. He has no economic background. He has no environmental background. He has no agriculture background. And he's also the founder of the Mars Society. :lol He doesn't have a clue about what he's writing about.
July 5, 200915 yr Author Here is an outstanding article from a couple of days ago that attempts to assess the economic consequences that this climate legislation will have upon the costs of goods and energy. These costs will inevitably affect everyone on the planet, if this bill passes the Senate and Obama signs it into law. I really recommend reading it in order to gain some perspective as to why so many of us are vehemently opposed to these new measures. The Costs of the Cap-and-Trade Bill July 1, 2009, 9:45 a.m. By Robert Zubrin Special to Roll Call On June 25, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate stabilization act, which would institute a cap-and-trade system to restrict Americans carbon emissions. While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere. To understand this, it is only necessary to look at the numbers. According to a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in April, by 2015 the price of carbon emission indulgences required by the bill for industries to operate could be expected to run between $13 and $17 per ton of CO2 emitted. It may be noted that this estimate was made by an Obama administration agency highly favorable to the bill and that it did not take into account the very real possibility that speculators might act aggressively to buy up all the available indulgences and then, acting like ticket scalpers, force industrial users to purchase them at greatly inflated prices. So these EPA figures for carbon emission costs should be viewed as minimal. That said, lets stipulate the $15/ton midrange of the EPA estimate, and see what it implies. The United States emits about 9 billion tons of CO2 per year. Therefore, at a rate of $15/ton fee for emission indulgences, the bill would impose a tax of $135 billion per year on the nation. Divided by the U.S. population of 300 million, that works out to a cost of $450 per year levied on every American man, woman or child, or $1,800 for a family of four. While for wealthy individuals like Al Gore such an impost might represent a mere pittance, for working families struggling hard to make ends meet it would be a very significant burden. But that is not even the worst part of it. As a result of the markup of carbon costs, a lot of those working families will be out of work and unable to pay their existing bills, let alone new ones. Consider: Burning one ton of coal produces about three tons of CO2. So a tax of $15 per ton of CO2 emitted is equivalent to a tax of $45/ton on coal. The price of Eastern anthracite coal runs in the neighborhood of $45/ton, so under the proposed system, such coal would be taxed at a rate of about 100 percent. The price of Western bituminous coal is currently about $12/ton. This coal would therefore be taxed at a rate of almost 400 percent. Coal provides half of Americas electricity, so such extraordinary imposts could easily double the electric bills paid by consumers and businesses across half the nation. In addition, many businesses, such as the metals and chemical industries, use a great deal of coal directly. By doubling or potentially even quadrupling the cost of their most basic feedstock, the cap-and-trade systems indulgence fees could make many such businesses uncompetitive and ultimately throw millions of working men and women onto the unemployment lines. A gallon of petroleum-derived liquid fuel produces about 20 pounds, or 1 percent of a ton, of CO2 when burned. But it takes about 1.5 gallons of oil to produce one gallon of refined liquid fuel. So a $15/ton tax on CO2 emissions will also cause an increase in the price of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on the order of $0.22/gallon. This will not only hit consumers pockets, but increase transport costs throughout the economy, thereby disabling businesses and increasing unemployment levels still more. While harming the economy, such a gas tax will do nothing material toward the truly essential goal of decreasing Americas dependence on foreign oil. Indeed, the bills dramatic hikes in electricity costs will have the opposite effect, since only 3 percent of Americas electricity is derived from oil, and by forcefully increasing electric power costs, the bill will actually discourage adoption of electric means of transport, including mass-transit systems today and potentially plug-in hybrid cars in the future. Americas dependence on foreign oil could be substantially relieved by legislation requiring that new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled and thus able to run equally well on alcohol fuels derived from a multitude of nonpetroleum sources, but the bills provisions in this area are so weak as to be worthless. But all these bad aspects of the Waxman-Markey bill pale before its potential impact on the worlds food supply. Americas agricultural sector is one of the greatest success stories in human history. In 1930, hunger still stalked the entire globe. Not just in Africa, India and China, but even in Europe and America, the struggle to simply get enough food to live on still preoccupied billions of people. Since 1930, the world population has tripled. But instead of going hungrier, people nearly everywhere are now eating much better. This miracle is the work of American farmers, who have not only produced huge surpluses to feed the world, but used the income gained from such good work to pioneer ever more advanced techniques that have enabled farmers everywhere to grow more. This progress is still continuing. In 2007, Iowa alone produced more corn than the entire United States did in 1947, and the 300,000 American corn growers as a whole produced 784 billion pounds of corn, an amount sufficient to supply 130 pounds of corn per year to every person on the planet. But this miracle depends upon the availability of cheap fertilizer and pesticides, which in turn require carbon-based process energy to produce. If you tax carbon, you tax fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bills increased transport costs inflating the burden still more. Thats enough to make many farmers use less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means less food. To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer, it is only necessary to go to the supermarket and compare the price of the organic produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular produce, which, while just as nutritious, typically costs less than half as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily pay such high prices for their food that is their right. But to impose such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather, is self-indulgent in the extreme. In the 220 years of our republic, there may have been worse pieces of legislation enacted by Congress than the Waxman-Markey bill, but none readily comes to mind. The Senate needs to take a stand and stop this disastrous act from passing into law. c/o rollcall.com . :lol Woah. Wait a second here. You call this an outstanding article. It's poorly constructed gibberish. Talks about only the costs. What about the benefits? Like the money that will go lower and middle income people to help off-set the cost, just to name one. And then the writer goes on to indulge in some nonsense scare tactics that we're all gonna' be paying much more for food, which will be scarce, because of a $60 per ton increase in fertilizer costs. Fertilizer costs about $1,000 per ton. This is a garbage article. Did you research who the author is. He has no economic background. He has no environmental background. He has no agriculture background. And he's also the founder of the Mars Society. :lol He doesn't have a clue about what he's writing about. This cap and trade bill is the most evil thing to be passed through Congress since the Federal Reserve in 1919. Give me some reasons why you like this bill that no one EVER read and just signed? Reasons I don't like this bill: 1-The bill is expected to KILL 2 MILLION jobs. 2-It will RAISE TAXES $3,000 a year per family; by some estimates up to $6,000 for a family by 2030. 3- It will encourage MORE businesses moving out of the country. 4- It will have NO EFFECT on so called man made global warming. 5- Other countries that have instituted these carbon taxes are REGRETTING their actions as their economies suffer (Austraulia, Spain, etc...). Countries I might add that are getting out of it! 6- This is a bad bill that's only real purpose is to RAISE TAXES! If anybody wants to see OBAMA on the campaign trail saying "I WILL NEVER RAISE TAXES", let me know. Then he says "Well it's only the price of a stamp per day, per family." He's full of it!
July 5, 200915 yr Author I read almost 200 pages of this bill. Horrible, absolutely horrible. Global Warming is barely mentioned. This issue is becoming IRRELEVANT because past pro-warming champions have jumped off the bandwagon, such as Claude Allegre who is credited with being a very early proponent over 20 years ago. The founder of The Weather Channel called it the 'biggest sham ever.' This bill was egregious. Taxes on cows for methane, EPA approval for non-complying lightbulbs. Every town, municipality and village will also have to retrofit all heating/cooling/streetlighting to be in compliance. What is it with the Democrats absolutely burying this nation in fees, taxes and penalties?! During an economy in a freefall?! Idealogues and alarmists, congratulations IF this passes the Senate and thats a big if. Now the rest of the nation REALLY hates CA because it makes our restrictive and draconian build standards mandatory for the other 49 states. I'm sure everyone is just dying to emulate all that is California right about now. Co2 accounts for about 2% of our atmospheric particulates. Greatest fraud ever.
July 6, 200915 yr No, your assessment is laughable. You dismiss this piece as gibberish without just cause. There are no net economic benefits to be had with this legislation. It is not unfathomable that these enormous costs will outweigh any phony benefits of government micromanagement. How will the money go to lower income individuals? The author describes all of the hidden costs that will be absorbed by low and middle income families through energy caps. Explain to me how these poor and income families will be reimbursed fiscally. This is a consumption tax, plain and simple. Where is this money coming from that you speak of? We will be paying more for food and not just through fertilizer costs (which you failed to discredit). Energy is required in industrial food production and transportation to the marketplace. When the government imposes energy limits upon energy production, the costs of these processes will increase and the consumers will have to foot the bill. I repeat, there are no positive cost considerations to be found under a cap and trade system. The fertilizer concern is a valid one as well. We have experienced a several fold price increase in fertilizer over the last several years, making fertilizer prices increase at a faster rate than energy prices. Any measures to lead to price stability are necessary in keeping food prices down and it is completely foolish to impose these limitations, hurt the poor and middle class, just because the environmentalists think it is necessary to try to prevent climate change. I actually think he underestimated the cost increase of fertilizer, because this no legislation will cause the prices of natural gas to skyrocket for fertilizer production. He accentuates the point well of how many other commodities are extremely sensitive to increases in energy prices (as evidenced by the several hundred percent increase in fertilizer we've observed in the last 5-6 years). If we place further restrictions on carbon fuel, expect these prices to influence the pricing of every commodity that requires fuel in its manufacturing or transportation. I repeat, there are no positive cost considerations to be had in this bill. I'm still waiting for you to outline them for me. I asked you to explain this in the other thread and you failed to do so after I had explained why an energy tax would result in costs to be absorbed by the consumers. I also love the pathetic attempt to dismiss this argument based upon his credentials. I suppose you would prefer to take the lazy route instead of doing the leg work yourself. I know who he is. He has a degree in mathematics, two degrees in aeroscience, and a PhD in nuclear engineering. He is certainly qualified to write an editorial piece for a newspaper detailing the range of costs to absorbed through these government constraints. Engineers in the industrial sector, and he has a doctorate degree in this area, are the most prone to enderstanding the complex network of energy supply that needs to be considered in manufacture. His article is an attempt to draw attention to the various processes that are energy-price sensitive that will be influenced by this draconian legislation and he is more than qualified to do so, especially given the nature of this editorial (non-academic). Please try agin. This time please explain to me how middle income families will end up saving money on energy bills and commodities under a cap and trade system. I take issue with you presenting some ill-informed scare piece which speaks to food shortages and "organic food prices" which the author postulates we'll all face for non-organic food. And giving it your imprampteur as a highly recommended article, when it's in effect, by your own admission, really nothing more than a non-academic blog opinion by some ill-informed aeronautical engineer. A person who founded and is president of the MARS SOCIETY. This is someone who's devoted his life to the premise that spending billions(trillions?) to travel to MARS is a net positive for humanity. Woo-hoo! . . I've never said that there would not be costs. This is a point we agreed on in another thread. I did take issue with you prematurally declaring this the "largest tax increase in history", but in the end we also agreed that you were wrong here. It's too early to tell what the NET monetary effect will be of this market driven legislation. It's also too early to tell what the net overall benefit will be(monetary and environmentally), and exactly how many people will wind up saving money(net monetary benefit). We're dealing with a work in progress. It's passed the house. It still needs to pass in some form in the Senate, and then it needs to pass, in some form, as a reconciled bill. For now though,: . . The report cited by Markey and Waxman predicts the bill would have a net annual economywide cost of $22 billion — or about $175 per household — in 2020. Divide that number by 365 days, and you get about 48 cents. A first-class stamp costs 44 cents, so Waxman is close. The CBO's estimate includes several assumptions about important decisions that still must be made by Congress, such as how much energy companies will pay to buy and trade polluting credits. But it's worth reading the fine print on this one, because CBO notes that the actual cost per family will vary depending on income. For example, low-income consumers could expect to save $40 a year, while wealthy people will see a net increase for energy costs of $235 to $340 every year. And the analysis does not include the costs or benefits of other parts of the bill, such as government efforts to quickly develop new technology, wrote CBO director Douglas Elmendorf in a June 20 blog post. It's also important to note that the costs will vary year to year. As the bill stands, polluting allowances will initially be given away for free. But by 2035, about 70 percent of those allocations will be sold by the government. Supporters of the bill say federal revenue from the program would be used to pay for tax credits and rebates for the middle class. . . You should look beyond the blog comments and talking points on Mises.org and form your own opinion instead of blindly following the sheeple party line. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that if you open your mind you're smarter than they are......You initially attacked(rightly so) the tariff elements. This argument lost steam as President Obama addressed it directly saying he was against that. It's not going to be part of whatever bill passes. Now you use some blog post by a whackadoo to scare people into thinking we'll be paying exorbinant prices for food, if we can find it. :thumbdown
July 6, 200915 yr Ill say PATRIOT Act was probably worse than this. I'd agree with this 1,000%. You mean the unPATRIOTIC ACT. That's much worse than this legislation. The Patriot Act is the worst piece of legislation passed and signed by a POTUS in my life. I think that's a law that we're all against.
July 6, 200915 yr Something tells me wmm is going to defend PATRIOT because of terrorists. Big governments ok as long as it's used to track scary muslims.
July 6, 200915 yr Author Something tells me wmm is going to defend PATRIOT because of terrorists. Big governments ok as long as it's used to track scary muslims. Um....no. No one in Congress even read this bill. Business' and homes will need to change all light fixtures before being sold. This is the largest CONTROL Facist Government the US has ever seen. If you don't mind "inspectors" inside your home whenever you choose and paying imaginary taxes for an imaginary scientific theory Global Warming then go for it! I can promise you are in the minority for this bill. No one I've met likes this bill- Dems/Repubs/Independents.....its a load of BS. Again, another one of your posts backed up with zero data or facts. Why do you like this bill? You like taxes or intruders in your house? Which one? And from the Wall Street Journal: The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years. Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can't repeal that reality.
July 6, 200915 yr Again, another one of your posts where you put words in someone's mouth. I don't think I've ever defended this bill, I just stated one bill that I felt is more dangerous (And which was not really read or thought through before passage). God forbid someone doesn't think this is the WORST BILL EVER (FACT!), they are defending it. Good logic. God, this is why you suck. The only things I've said is that criticizing using money to try to "fix" global warming and then turning around and saying we should spend money to put a man on Mars is really, really dumb, and that I think PATRIOT Act was worse than this. But in your head, all of a sudden I'm supporting the bill, and I'm a fascist, and I want people inside of everyone's house checking lightbulbs. You take things completely out of context and put your own preconceptions on other people, regardless of whether they have any basis in reality. And personally, I have zero problem paying taxes. But that's neither here nor there.
July 6, 200915 yr Author Again, another one of your posts where you put words in someone's mouth. I don't think I've ever defended this bill, I just stated one bill that I felt is more dangerous (And which was not really read or thought through before passage). God forbid someone doesn't think this is the WORST BILL EVER (FACT!), they are defending it. Good logic. God, this is why you suck. The only things I've said is that criticizing using money to try to "fix" global warming and then turning around and saying we should spend money to put a man on Mars is really, really dumb, and that I think PATRIOT Act was worse than this. But in your head, all of a sudden I'm supporting the bill, and I'm a fascist, and I want people inside of everyone's house checking lightbulbs. You take things completely out of context and put your own preconceptions on other people, regardless of whether they have any basis in reality. And personally, I have zero problem paying taxes. But that's neither here nor there. You should be a politician/lawyer. What does the Patriot Act have to do with this bill? You comparing the two bills just shows you can't handle talking about this bill.
July 6, 200915 yr You're a trip, man. 'This cap and trade bill is the most evil thing to be passed through Congress since the Federal Reserve in 1919. Give me some reasons why you like this bill that no one EVER read and just signed?' I simply named a bill I thought was worse than this (I hesitate to use the word 'evil' as you did because it implies a level of malice I'm not comfortable with putting on politicians quite as easily as you.)
July 6, 200915 yr Author My point exactly...I rest my case. You just say the Patriot Act is worse with no logical or factual proof or facts like all of your posts. The Patriot Act did not raise your taxes or cost the government as much as this Cap and Trade bill and that is a fact. Give me some facts to support your theories for once. Why is the Patriot Act worse?
July 6, 200915 yr Author My point exactly...I rest my case. You just say the Patriot Act is worse with no logical or factual proof or facts like all of your posts. The Patriot Act did not raise your taxes or cost the government as much as this Cap and Trade bill and that is a fact. Give me some facts to support your theories for once. Why is the Patriot Act worse?
July 6, 200915 yr Author Here is what some analysts are saying about this Cap and trade Bill: 1) Cap and trade will raise each household's taxes by over $3000 a year- Warren Buffett 2) The cap and trade is estimated to cost the oil and gas indusrty 400 BILLION dollars over the next 10 years iff passed. Who do you thinnks is going to pay for this? We are as consumers. If this passes, we can all look forward to $8.00 per gallon gasoline prices.. 3) Actually MIT did a study this year that says a cost of $4500 per family of four per year. Oil prices will see an increase of 23%, natural gas by 20%. Not to mention the possibility that smaller refineries will be driven out of business...Further increasing the prices and contributing to economic problems when those people get released from their jobs and more people start losing there homes... Furthermore, the two scariest facts include: 1)this hasn't worked in other countries in the past and 2) NO ONE READ THIS BILL and just signed it! Here is another solid article: Banksters Love Cap-and-Trade James Corbett The Corbett Report Thursday, July 2, 2009 The well-placed and well-connected are set to make trillions off new climate bill; economic collapse about to accelerate The sweeping new bill which just passed the House last Friday, the Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, is ostensibly about climate change, but it is in fact a bill of staggering economic ramifications that is going to accelerate the takeover of the economy by the well-placed financiers who have already plundered the Treasury and the Fed of $12+ trillion and counting. It was rushed through the House in the tradition of such nightmarish legislation as the Patriot Act and the banker bailout of last October: hundreds of pages were added to it at the last minute and it was humanly impossible for anyone to have read it before they voted on it. This, of course, is exactly what Obama promised his administration would never allow to happen, and for good reason; bills passed in this manner are always the result of fear and panic and inevitably results in legislation that would never be passed upon sober second thought. In this case, the rush to pass this new bill was an attempt to stop any scrutiny of a plan that is going to utterly transform the American economy, further centralize control of citizens’ lives in the hands of unaccountable federal bureaucrats and complete the transfer of the American economy from Main Street to Wall Street. And all of this in the name of fighting a threat which itself is a demonstrable fraud. In short, the banksters and bureaucrats are sharpening their knives, preparing to butcher what’s left of the carcass of the United States, and a good portion of the public are not only willing to allow it but are actually clamoring for it. The first thing that needs to be understood about the brand new trillion dollar carbon-trading commodities market that will be brought into existence if this bill passes the Senate is that it is a ripoff designed by and for the very corporate interests the environmentalists claim to be fighting. For an historical precedent of what is being proposed under this cap-and-trade scam one can look to Enron, which immediately found ways to plunder billions of dollars from new energy market legislation passed by the Clinton Administration in 2000. They gave schemes for manipulating billions of dollars out of Californians funny little names like Death Star and even went so far as to rig up a completely fake trading floor in their offices in order to bamboozle investors who were interested in the company’s remarkable success. They got away with it because they were The Smartest Guys in the Room, much brighter than the government bureaucrats who were supposed to stop them from committing such blatant fraud (assuming the regulators weren’t simply paid to look the other way). And now supporters of this new bill are putting their blind faith in these same bureaucrats to regulate a scheme to create a vastly more complex market with hundreds of times as much money at stake. Is it any wonder Enron was a booster for cap-and-trade? That the new carbon trading market can and will be manipulated by the very same financial oligarchs and government bureaucrats who have brought the world to the brink of economic Armageddon is laid bare in a must-read article by Matt Taibi in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. In “The Great Bubble Machine� Taibi meticulously documents how the amazingly well-connected Goldman Sachs has managed to manipulate and profit from every financial bubble since the Roaring Twenties and how they’re getting set to do it all over again with the creation of a carbon trading bubble: “The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot.� In effect, this bill creates an entirely new commodity that is guaranteed to generate ever-increasing profit for those who have already spent millions preparing to get in on the ground floor. Here’s a hint: that does not include your average mom and pop investor or your dual-income family struggling to make ends meet in a crashing economy. Here’s another hint: it does include financial juggernauts like Goldman Sachs who have been investing in solar, wind, and biofuels for years and now just happen to find themselves in the perfect position to start reaping vast profits from their headstart in the new carbon credit economy (and you thought Paulson was into going green for any other reason than making green?). It also includes Obama, who was instrumental in helping set up the Chicago Climate Exchange for his political cronies like Al Gore, who already has a company which he uses to buy carbon credits from himself and who had made multi-million dollar investments in companies developing carbon tracking software that will be essential to the new carbon-swindle economy. There are still those out there, however, who believe that this time it’s going to be different. This time the government is going to set up a new trillion dollar industry overnight, make sure it is regulated by angels of unquestionable integrity and goodwill, prevent it from being manipulated by big business, and create scores of new “green� jobs in the renewable energy industry (presumably to replace the hundreds of thousands of jobs that the economy is already hemorrhaging or the hundreds of thousands more that will be shed when these carbon taxes and penalties really ratchet up in the next decade). Well, let’s assume for a moment that we have crossed into just such a fantasy world. It still does not change the fact that the bill itself only offers phony solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. The phony solution is the “Clean Energy� part of the Clean Energy and Security Act. What feelgood platitudes about pumping billions of dollars into solar, wind and alternative energy projects obscure is that throwing money hand over fist at inherently flawed technologies will not actually make them work, nor will it make the money-hungry charlatans who promote them any more honest. Just ask Albert Lanier. He’s a freelance journalist who has been writing a series of articles about First Wind, a Massachusetts-based wind developer that is currently being investigated by the New York Attorney General’s office. In a recent interview with The Corbett Report he revealed how the Mafia has been linked to the Italian wind farm industry, which might say more about the industry than it does about the mob. Of course, the entire idea of “cleaning� the atmosphere of carbon dioxide seems a bit ridiculous when you realize that by historical levels we are living in a CO2-starved environment, that global surface temperatures are dropping, that global ocean temperatures are dropping, that key proponents of the manmade global warming theory have been caught faking data to support their arguments, that Arctic sea ice is expanding, and that sea levels are not rising. But why let actual science get in the way of a good scare story, especially when that scare story can be used to create a new trillion dollar industry for the banksters? For those who cannot be convinced to consider an issue until it affects them personally, rest assured this draconian new legislation will reach into every American citizen’s living room…literally. As Congressman Steve Scalise has already pointed out, this “climate bill� contains within it a new national building code that supersedes all existing state codes. If enacted, this legislation will create an entirely new class of federally-funded green brigades with the mandate to perform house-to-house inspections to look for violations of this new “green� building code. They would even be able to impose civil penalties for code violations (like having the wrong windows or lightbulbs).
July 6, 200915 yr My point exactly...I rest my case. You just say the Patriot Act is worse with no logical or factual proof or facts like all of your posts. The Patriot Act did not raise your taxes or cost the government as much as this Cap and Trade bill and that is a fact. Give me some facts to support your theories for once. Why is the Patriot Act worse? as I already said, I don't have a problem paying taxes, so for me personal privacy and civil liberties are more important than the marginal personal cost of this bill to me. Neither is a very good piece of legislature, and I haven't defended cap and trade once, but I think the unprecedented powers handed to the federal government during a time of great national fear for the PATRIOT act was worse than this.
July 6, 200915 yr In your second post on this page, you failed to cite any of the numbers you used. It's a point that has been beaten into the ground by this point, but maybe if you provided a link for f***ing anything you post, you might be taken more seriously. Also probably worth noting James Corbett isn't a very reliable source, from a quick perusal of his site. A laundry list of conspiracy theories dot his site.
July 6, 200915 yr Author In your second post on this page, you failed to cite any of the numbers you used. It's a point that has been beaten into the ground by this point, but maybe if you provided a link for f***ing anything you post, you might be taken more seriously. Also probably worth noting James Corbett isn't a very reliable source, from a quick perusal of his site. A laundry list of conspiracy theories dot his site. In case you have been sleeping, about half of America right now doesn't support Obama or what the government is controlling or spending. If you want to call this a conspiracy then so be it. Most people call it facts. According to Gallop, Obama's approval rating continues to drop by the day, 67% of the people are disatisfied with the state of the nation, consumer mood is 60% negative, life evaluation has 45% struggling, only 22% of companies are hiring while 25% are letting go, economic positions are 52% poor, 60% think things are getting worse, etc. There are facts that is hard to argue so yes this bill is MUCH worse than the Patriot Act because during the worst Economy since the Great Depression, the government decides to TAX us!!! That's the worst thing they could do whether it's the price of a stamp or $3,000, it doesn't matter. It's BS and most people know this.
July 6, 200915 yr So you're saying half of America does support Obama and what the government is doing? It sounds a lot worse for your argument when it's put like that, no? And that's not really a reply to what I said.
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