By Congressman Joe PittsThe House Energy and Commerce Committee has begun consideration of a cap and trade plan that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It would be more accurate to call it a cap and tax plan because it is nothing more than a tax on the energy that every American uses to go about their daily lives.
As a member of the Committee, I have serious concerns about the plan for several reasons, including the fact that we still don’t have actual bill text that we can use to analyze the true cost of the bill. But most importantly, I believe this plan is a job killer and nothing more than a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to government bureaucrats.
I believe we should be good stewards of this earth and its resources, but especially in the midst of a recession, this plan will amount to a massive new energy tax on American families that we cannot afford. Everything from making dinner in your oven, to heating the water for your morning shower, to commuting to your job each day, will all become more expensive overnight with this cap and tax plan.
And President Obama intends to use the money from the tax to spend not on advancing a clean energy economy, but on instituting universal healthcare.
Instead of creating the biggest of big government programs to transfer trillions of dollars of money from energy consumers to the federal government, we ought to be allowing the market to bring forward successful, clean, alternative energy technologies.
My Democratic colleagues aren’t even serious enough about reducing greenhouse gases to consider nuclear power—a reliable, clean option for energy generation. We should be moving forward with all of the practical solutions to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including nuclear energy and waste-to-energy, a proven clean technology that has been successful in Lancaster for decades. We can reduce greenhouse gases and increase this nation’s energy security, but we can’t get there by relying solely on wind and solar power. We need to use wind and solar in conjunction with nuclear, hydro, biomass, waste-to-energy and others.
Though we obviously don’t have a complete bill to analyze, we can make at least an educated guess about how devastating this plan would be for our economy. Cap and trade legislation from the last Congress that attempted to regulate greenhouse gases (called the Warner-Lieberman plan) would have resulted in aggregate real GDP losses of nearly $5 trillion and 900,000 jobs lost in the first 20 years after enactment. And the Waxman-Markey draft we are currently considering in committee is even more sweeping than the Warner-Lieberman plan. Plainly, the economic consequences will be worse.
We can’t tax our way to a successful new energy economy. We need to move forward with a clean energy plan that helps, not hurts our economy.
As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich pointed out during his testimony before the committee this week, we should be paving a way forward with incentives, not punishment. This cap and tax plan is a massive punishment for everyone in America that uses energy—that is, everyone in America. Instead, we should be crafting policies that create incentives to bring on-line new nuclear plants, hydrogen storage technology, more cost-effective wind and solar technology, smart-grid technology, and more efficient electricity transmission.
We don’t need to wash trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money through the federal bureaucracy in order to get to a clean energy economy. The alternative to a job-killing, big government cap and tax plan is to create incentives and let the market pick the winners.
Rep. Joe Pitts represents Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District.
