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Carbon Control News reports that in a June 9 hearing before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee,

[David Sokol, the chairman of Warren Buffet’s utility subsidiary MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, said] utilities, and by extension consumers, will be charged twice under the trading provisions of the legislation, “first to pay for emission allowances, which will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one ounce, and then for the construction of new low- and zero-carbon power plants and other actions that will actually do the job of reducing these emissions… This bill will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and we think it is wrong to saddle customers with these unnecessary and duplicative costs that provide them with absolutely no benefits.”

The Waxman-Markey climate bill amounts to a $9 trillion tax that will reduce personal consumption by up to $2 trillion by mid-century, according to an analysis presented yesterday by the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

No effort was made to estimate the benefits of Waxman-Markey, apparently because of the difficulty of such an estimation, according to a report in Carbon Control News.

To summarize: We know Waxman-Markey will hurt taxpayers, consumers and the economy, and it’s too difficult to determine whether the bill will provide any benefits — so let’s hurry up and enact the Mother of All Taxes?

Click here for Brookings’ “Fact Sheet.”

Click here for Brookings’ Powerpoint presentation.

UN environmental chief Achim Steiner said yesterday that,

“Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere. There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere.”

The notion that plastic bags pose some special hazard to marine life, however is a myth. As reported in the Times (UK) on March 8, 2008,

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds…

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals…

From The Guardian,

Britain and other rich countries will be asked to accept a compulsory levy on international flight tickets and shipping fuel to raise billions of dollars to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to combat climate change.

The suggestions come at the start of the second week in the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn, where 192 countries are starting to negotiate a global agreement to limit and then reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The issue of funding for adaptation is critical to success but the hardest to agree.

The aviation levy, which is expected to increase the price of long-haul fares by less than 1%, would raise $10bn (£6.25bn) a year, it is said.

Poor countries are just cutting their own throats by siding with the greens who, if they had their way, would simply ban international air travel — except, of course, for the green elites like Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Richard Branson, the Google creeps, etc.

Moreover, if poor countries want to be richer, in addition to political reform, they should kick the anti-development, people-hating greens out of their countries, as Paul Driessen explains in his book Eco-imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.

From AFP:

You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint — the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.

So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.

Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study…

Click here for the full article…

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… even the Washington Post is worried about this one:

In fact, the [Waxman-Markey] bill also contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs, and it will reshape America’s economy in dozens of ways that many don’t realize.

Here is just one: The bill would give the federal government power over local building codes. It requires that by 2012 codes must require that new buildings be 30 percent more efficient than they would have been under current regulations. By 2016, that figure rises to 50 percent, with increases scheduled for years after that. With those targets in mind, the bill expects organizations that develop model codes for states and localities to fill in the details, creating a national code. If they don’t, the bill commands the Energy Department to draft a national code itself.

The Post concludes:

Is the best way to achieve that, though, to federalize what has long been a matter of local concern? And if the point of cap-and-trade is to change market incentives, why does Congress, and not the market, need to dictate these changes? Those are a few questions that emerge when you begin to read through the 900 pages.

One dream. One world. Obamaland für alle.

… then you probably don’t rely on coal.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on June 2 that,

If you were paying a lot for power in 2008 and you were not from Hawaii, you were probably living in the Northeast or California. All of the remaining utilities with the 10 highest power prices in 2008 were located in California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts…

The cheapest power prices in the United States in 2008 were again found in the Midwest and Southeast, where utilities with ample coal-fired generation supply were able to offer customers prices frequently less than 6 cents or 7 cents per kWh on average across customer classes.

The anti-coal nature of cap-and-trade will ensure that all of us pay a lot for power and everything else that is produced by means of electricity — i.e., all goods and services.