Senator Bond Slams Global Warming Bill
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 09.10.07
This is an oldie but goodie: Global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 percent, according to a 2006 report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern. But taking action now, he says, would cost just 1 percent of the global gross domestic product.
We thought we'd dust off The Stern Review in response to Sen. Kit Bond's (R-Mo.) criticism of Congress's latest global-warming-legislation proposal, that imposing limits of greenhouse-gas emissions would threaten the nation's economic growth.
"Your proposal would impose hardship on U.S. citizens and threatens robust growth in the U.S. economy," Bond said repeatedly in a letter last week to Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.), regarding their plan to reduce greenhouse gases by 70 percent by 2050.
The bipartisan Lieberman-Warner climate-change plan—particularly notable because Warner is the second-ranking Republican on the Environmental committee and a senior senator who didn't support global-warming legislation before—also gives industry flexibility under a cap-and-trade system that allows the buying and selling of pollution credits under decreasing overall limits.
But Bond's letter states that businesses would be placed in jeopardy because of duplicative state and regional carbon-control programs, and that low-income families would have their livelihoods disrupted by higher energy costs. And fight he says he will, to ensure that climate legislation does not "disproportionately hurt those who struggle to pay their energy bills," according to the Associated Press.
Sen. Lieberman is not a Democrat. He is a registered member of the Connecticut for Lieberman party
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Thanks, Daniel! I've amended his affiliation.
The most idiotic thing about this is that over the next couple decades, the companies that embrace global warming, and develop new, more efficient and clean products, new alternative energy sources and systems, will be the new Microsofts, Intels, and Ciscos. These companies will become hugely profitable and hugely influencial.
Just look at how it is already starting to happen; Toyota is absolutely killing GM and Ford.
But because of the dinosaur thinking in Washington, many, probably most, of these companies will be from Japan, Europe, South Korea, even China and India, but not the US.
We're afraid that fighting global warming will hurt our economy, but overall it would be the best thing ever. What it will hurt are old companies that resist change, like Ford, GM, and Exxon-Mobil. Unfortunately, these sort of companies have way to much influence in on our government.
Damn traitor...
Wow, I'm from Missouri and we have been dealing with Kit's backwards thinking for years, yet here at the University we have a building named after him, go figure.