You have heard much talk about various schemes devised by members of Congress to ensure that the energy tax masquerading as a rationing scheme — the cap-and-trade wonder that President Obama insists will cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” and “bankrupt” key industries — won’t cost you anything. And yet it will still lead you to use far less energy, result in the invention of pixie dust, and otherwise do all those things that Europe’s scheme failed to do.

From Europe today comes yet another admission that, unless the thing hurts — bad, it won’t do anything emissions-wise (nor climate-wise, given that the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations say fuggedaboudit).

Climate Wire writes of today’s Guardian story about UK lawmakers confronting the fact that cap-and-trade doesn’t reduce emissions, and pondering a tax on top of cap-and-trade to do what they said cap-and-trade would do (though we now know it merely moved money from productive uses to pals who had invested in schemes to profit from the scam):

To help boost the price of carbon from its level of €15 ($20) a ton to what the MPs see as a more credible price of €100 ($137) a ton, Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee is calling on the government to introduce new measures such as a carbon tax.
Friends of the Earth said the report’s findings were ‘another nail in the coffin’ of the Emission Trading System . . . .

Ah. So not the $7 to $35 per-ton fantasies we’ve been told would be sufficient to avoid Europe’s disaster. I’ll leave it to Iain Murray and David Kreutzer (or you can extrapolate from EIA) to tell us what that will mean per gallon and on your monthly electric bill.

But suffice it to say, despite all the happy-talk, cap-and-trade will cost you. A lot. So we might as well just admit it’s a gesture — the scandalousness of which we rarely see even in Washington — and then turn on those pushing it, politely requesting they seek other career opportunities or simply spend more time with their families. Should they decline, we vote them out.