|
|
|
|
Our leaders in Washington, D.C., just don’t get it. The American people do not want government-run health care. They don’t want the federal government increasing the cost of gasoline and electricity. The American people are fed up with the government making their lives more complicated.
Just this past week, Speaker Pelosi and her leadership team pushed through a massive – more than 1,400 pages – health-care bill by the narrow margin of 220-215. If just three people who voted for the massive bill had voted against it, it would have failed. A few months ago, the House passed the cap-and-trade bill by just a seven-vote margin, 219-212. On Nov. 6, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a version of the cap-and-trade bill by a 10-1 vote, but all of the Republicans on the committee boycotted. The Republicans wanted more time to study and discuss the consequences of passing such a far-reaching piece of legislation. For example, just a week earlier Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison released a study pointing out that the bill will impose a massive new national gas tax, raising the cost of gasoline and diesel and jet fuels to the tune of $3.6 trillion until 2050. The hardest hit will be farming and transportation (truckers, buses, airplanes, etc.). Yet, they push on. They push on even though more and more scientists realize that the temperature during the last 10 years has actually dropped. All of the commotion about global warming came from a report that the Earth’s temperature increased only one degree from 1900-1997. Since then, the Earth has cooled. The industrial and manufacturing sectors have lower greenhouse gas emissions today than in 1977. A major obstacle to implementation of a worldwide cap-and-trade program continues to be developing countries like China, India and even Bangladesh. The people in these countries are so poor that most of their citizens do not have access to running water, or inside plumbing, or electricity, or basic health care. The people of these developing countries could care less about cutting greenhouse gas emissions “to save the planet.” Heck, they’re more concerned about getting fresh water than saving the polar bears from the alleged thawing ice around the Arctic Circle. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid gang will run the economy of the U.S. into the ground if they are successful in passing the health-care and cap-and-trade bills.
Alex Mills is president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, which is the largest state oil and gas association in the nation. The opinions are solely of the author. |
