The Price of Playing with the Climate Change Gang

The Wall Street Journal published two interesting articles recently concerning Wonderboy's renewable energy initiatives.

Late last month, Daniel Henninger commented, unfavorably, on the administration's plans to subsidize non-carbon energy while taxing carbon emissions, but not calling the latter a tax.

Then a week or so later, Kim Strassel wrote extensively on Duke Energy's Jim Rogers' recent realization that he had been hoodwinked into supporting climate change-based energy policies.

Rogers, like other early adopters of the climate change-driven push for penalizing carbon-based energy production and consumption, assumed he would be given permits for what his company currently uses or emits.

Wrong. As Ms. Strassel points out, Congress, being Congress, intends to start with an auction. Thus, rather than monetizing private industry's possession of carbon emission permits as the private property they are, liberal Democrats and Wonderboy intend to claim that these permits are public property, and force industry to bid for them.

Of course, this results in a huge tax windfall to Congress, which will be passed along to consumers via higher energy costs.

Meanwhile, Congress has designs on at least $650B of tax revenue from these permits. A brand new tax source cloaked in the mantle of saving the planet. What could sound better than that?

Then all sorts of groups will kowtow to Democratic Representatives and Senators, in hopes of getting some of that nearly $1T of new swag.

It's hard to believe something this boneheaded and corrupt is really moving ahead through Congress. Harder still to believe any CEOs ever thought it would work differently.

Don't they know how Washington works by now?