Carter Wood has the story at NAM’s shopfloor.

Steve Milloy, the JunkMan: “President Obama wants to pay you to support global warming regulation. What he isn’t saying, however, is that his enticement won’t come close to covering what the regulations will cost you.”

It’s galling that President Obama’s first budget includes projected billions in new tax revenue … from a cap-and-trade carbon scheme that hasn’t been passed by Congress. In fact, the president is banking on tens of billions from the plan, which most economists will tell you is less efficient at addressing carbon concerns than would be a straight tax.

But since politicians hate saying they’re going to raise taxes on poor people (who use energy but may not pay income taxes), they call it cap and trade. Here’s the Wall Street Journal this morning:

Mr. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was refreshingly candid on this point with the New York Times earlier this month. Given that higher prices are supposed to motivate the changes necessary to reduce carbon energy use, Mr. Chu said he was worried that climate taxes may drive jobs to countries where costs are cheaper. “The concern about cap and trade in today’s economic climate,” he said, “is that a lot of money might flow to developing countries in a way that might not be completely politically sellable.” You are correct, sir.

Meanwhile, the political class loves a cap-and-trade tax because it gives them new economic and political power. Congress would create a new property right to expend CO2, setting a price per ton on carbon output, and then Congress would also get to determine the distribution of allowances. The Administration wants all of them to be auctioned off, which is what creates the giant revenue windfall. The politicians would then decide how to spend all of that new “climate revenue.”

Mr. Obama’s budget proposes to spend this windfall on two items: $15 billion a year in more subsidies for alternative fuels, and $65 billion or so a year to finance tax subsidies for workers, many of whom don’t pay income taxes. In other words, once this cap-and-trade tax is on the books, the revenue stream will create political constituencies that depend on it.

Let’s make a resolution together: let’s call this Cap-and-Tax. It will save time and explain the issue better.

An editorial from IBD this morning:

Shovel-ready stimulus? How about one that’ll create at least a million jobs, give our economy a multitrillion-dollar boost, make our nation energy-secure and won’t cost us a penny?

Today the Heritage Foundation held a conversation on the potential effects of global warming on the world economy. The bottom line: the world is not as bad off as doomsayers claim, even if their own statistics are to be believed.

Our host: Dr. David Kreutzer. The guest for today’s event was Dr. Indur Goklany — a well-respected doctor whose background lies in climate change and international climate change policy.

Interesting takeaways:

• Goklany says we’re told that the future is undeniably bad for humans if the planet gets warm, and that if we care about humanity we must recognize global warming is “the defining challenge of our age”
• Goklany uses for all of his calculations figures from the IPCC so that the politicization of this issue does not afford critics the ability to attack his calculations
• Goklany’s calculations show that even under the worst-case scenarios from the IPCC’s calculations, developing nations will be far better off in the future than they were in the past. for industrialized nations, good news: they will be better off, too. “we cannot say that our descendants will not be better off than we are.” Second, “all but the poorest scenario developing countries will be better off” in 2100 than industrialized countries were in 1990.
• To maximize human welfare, governments should push us “towards the richest scenario” rather than to the lowest-CO2 scenario.
• Goklany’s figures show that developing countries are going to be much wealthier in the future, despite some assumptions that they will not be able to adapt to a changing climate.
• By contrast, climate change poses little threat when set next to major health concerns for the global population. Goklany points to blood pressure, cholesterol, hunger, low fruit and vegetables, overweight, unsafe water, and tobacco smoke — all of which will kill more people than the alarmists’ assumption of climate change. (Note: you can forget about playing the “callous” card — he noted the tragedy but also pointed to the tragedy of deaths related to those other causes)
• Goklany notes that under many alarmist studies, climate change reduces the population at risk of water stress. The oddity: reducing the risk of climate change will increase the population at risk of water stress. (weird — ed)
• The single biggest threat to species: conversion of habitat into cropland (so, you know, it’d probably be a good idea to return to low-efficiency organic farming, right?)
• Goklany says if you focus on the entire population, fighting less-expensive and more pressing problems will help more people. Our analysis: Focusing on climate change at the expense of bigger problems will cost too much money, which will cost lives.

Basically, the news is good. Will eco-zealots accept it? Nah. They’ll call this guy a shill even as he uses the alarmists’ own numbers

Be sure to check out Heritage’s video of the conversation for more details.

The Heritage Foundation’s Dr. David Kreutzer asks:

If species have survived repeated changes in global temperature on the order of 10 degrees; and changes in habitat brought on by sea-level ups and downs of 300 to 400 feet, why will a two-degree change global temperature or a two-foot change in sea level be their undoing?

Read the rest to get Some Needed Climate Perspective.

Noel Sheppard over at NewsBusters notes a Japanese energy commission report, released last month, that challenges the largely western eco-zeal on global warming. Sheppard notes:

The study also called the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion that global temperatures are likely to continue to rise “an unprovable hypothesis,” while castigating “the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis.”

But, of course, they can’t be right, right? Wouldn’t it be wrong to challenge the notion that man is the cause of global warming? We can’t wait for the unhinged response from western environmentalists.

Go here.

“Carbon Taxes Very Unpopular In United States” … from FuturePundit.

It’s a good reminder that when we discuss the lesser of evils between a tax on carbon and a cap-and-trade scheme … they’re both “evils” of a sort. Neither are good. One just happens to be far, far worse.

You know they will blame global warming: A satellite launched from California failed to reach orbit today, crashing into the sea near Antarctic and dooming a $273 million mission to study global-warming gases.