Dunlap's alternative not 'cheap'

Dallas Dunlap's recent letter explaining that "Cap and trade is cheaper than the alternative" has to be the premier example of confusion-speak for the year.

First he tells us the government will set a limit on CO2 emissions (take away some more of our rights - although our Constitution gives them no such authority) then "freely give" some of those rights to selected companies (pick winners to receive something valuable it has taken away from the losers). Then the government sells the rest of the rights it has seized in order to fund the whole process, plus maybe pay off some of the debts it has run up funding other pet projects, such as the ongoing ethanol travesty.

But Dunlap tells us this is not a tax, since the government is only selling a "negotiable commodity." Flash for Dallas: When government creates a "requirement" out of thin air that threatens to put private enterprise out of business and then "sells" relief from that requirement to those being threatened by it, that's a tax. Or perhaps if we want to be completely accurate, it is simply extortion. If you or I tried such a scheme, we would rightly land in jail before the ink was dry on the permit.

Dunlap goes on to tell us he "hopes" a private market for the permits will develop and that then all government will have to do is to reduce the cap so the permits become more and more valuable. In other words, taking away still more rights becomes a lot easier - one definition of a successful government program, I suppose. Of course, increasing the cost of the permits this way does not change their intrinsic value. It simply creates artificial scarcity, the ultimate costs of which are borne by consumers and the profits from which are realized by middlemen and sharp traders.

Dunlap may want to do a little homework on Europe where this scheme has been in force for several years. The result: billions of profit made by those who trade in the permits, endless gaming of the system to sell creative CO2 reduction schemes, and less reduction in actual CO2 emissions than was accomplished in the United States over the same period without any such cockamamie scheme in place.

Having established that, he understands neither economics nor the free enterprise system. Dallas then goes on to lecture us on the supposed costs of the alternative to his favorite scheme. He tells us that "Business as usual" will cost us lives, property and higher prices for food as agricultural production withers in the face of climate change. Scary if true. I am certainly glad that it is not.

First there is no agreement that human activity is causing any global warming. In fact, there is evidence that global temperatures are recently not increasing at all and may be declining. Nor is there agreed, evidence-based science showing that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 increase global temperatures at all. Even if one believes the most accepted climate models, reducing CO2 production in the United States to levels that haven't been seen since before the automobile was invented, can be expected to reduce global temperatures by only about 0.2 degree, 90 years from now.

Hardly a potential change that one ought to consider a good trade-off for strangling our economy and sending millions of jobs to countries like China and India that refuse to participate in the game.

Perhaps Dunlap would like to tell us how many lives will be lost because the resources needed to create better medicines, more productive crops, and safer transportation systems will instead be soaked up by the government bureaucracy needed to run his system and the Wall Street wizards who will predictably get rich trading and manipulating the permits it creates. A little like the auto mileage limitations our federal government imposed in the 1970s in the name of saving oil, which have done little if anything to accomplish that goal but continue to result in an additional 2,000 or more lives lost on our highways each year.

Nothing lasts forever, including our supply of oil and natural gas. However, the end of oil has been forecast to be "just a few years away" for at least the last 50 years. The way to deal with this inevitability is to give our inventors and our free enterprise system the freedom to innovate and the rewards that come from meeting our needs more effectively than the old ways.

Government intervention, no matter how cleverly cloaked in slogans and justified by politically correct "crises," will more than likely make things worse, and will certainly cost dearly those in whose name that government was created and whose needs it was meant to serve. That's not an alternative I consider "cheap," nor one I want to experience or pass on to future generations of Americans.

Jerry Lebo

Spring Hill