The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil leak occurred on April 20th. So why is President Obama pushing his April 19th global-warming agenda as a solution to it?
By now everyone has heard about Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s words: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel went on to explain that “what I mean by that is, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
“Things you think you could not do before” certainly describes the pre-spill prospects for global-warming legislation. Simply put, the American people do not believe that global warming is a crisis justifying an energy-price-boosting, jobs-killing, economy-crushing response in the midst of a recession. And passage of another major bill at least as unpopular as health-care reform — in an election year no less — seemed dim.
Recognizing that green was not selling, Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade had for months tried to repackage it as a jobs bill (all the green jobs from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (cap-and-trade will stick it to OPEC). Mind you, the agenda did not change at all. Indeed the latest bill, the American Power Act, co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) is just a slightly watered-down version of the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last June, which its main sponsor, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) unabashedly touted as a solution to the climate crisis.
But the green-jobs and energy-independence sales pitches did not move the needle much. So now, the president and his congressional allies are again repackaging the global-warming agenda, this time as a long-term solution to the oil spill. He even mentioned the Waxman bill in last night’s speech.
None of the new rationales makes sense, especially the oil-spill one. Needless to say, cap-and-trade would do nothing to clean up the oil in the Gulf. The only link to the spill is that it would jack up the price of gasoline high enough to force us to use less (a combination of higher fuel economy, reduced miles traveled, and a shift to alternative fuels and vehicles too expensive to compete otherwise). Less demand for gasoline would mean less demand for oil, thus less drilling, and presumably less future risk of spills.
In other words, cap-and-trade is, at best, a very indirect response to the oil spill, and one that would impose trillions of dollars in collateral economic damage. Here’s a better idea for the administration: Find out why the leak occurred, why numerous efforts to cap it failed, and why the cleanup isn’t going better, and impose reasonable fixes.
– Ben Lieberman is a senior policy analyst in energy and environmental issues at the Heritage Foundation.