Indiana governor Mitch Daniels gave the GOP weekly address this past weekend, and (as he did in the pages of the Wall Street Journal recently), he targeted the Obama Energy Tax.

One policy being pushed by the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, I regret to say, a poster child for government that cannot work. The scheme to radically change the sources and the cost of American energy through a system known as “cap and trade” may be well-intentioned, but it will cost us dearly in jobs and income, and it stands no chance of achieving its objective of a cooler earth. The national energy tax imposed by Speaker Pelosi’s climate change bill would double electric bills here in Indiana, working a severe hardship on low-income families, but that’s only where the damage starts. In a state where we like to make things, like steel and autos and RVs, it would cost us countless jobs, many of them heading offshore to China and India. Our farmers and livestock producers would see their costs skyrocket. And our coal miners would be looking for new work, while we leave affordable, homegrown energy idle in the ground.
And all for what? Even if one believes the administration’s own computer models, which they claim can predict temperatures fifty years away, the CO2 reductions from their bill will not budge the world thermometer by a tenth of a degree.
It’s become clear that the Pelosi bill has little to do with a cooler planet and everything to do with raising money for the out-of-control federal spending now underway in Washington. Please excuse us Midwesterners for feeling a bit like the targets of an imperialistic policy, devised in places like California, New York and Massachusetts for their benefit, at our expense. . . .
We have here a classic example of unwise government: The costs for all Americans will be certain, huge, and immediate. Any benefits are extremely uncertain, miniscule, and decades distant. Surely there is a better way.