Cap and Tax Squeaks Through House ... More Squeaks Expected

Yesterday the U.S. House narrowly passed the massive Waxman-Markey climate change (cap and tax) bill, 219-212. Forty-four Democrats voted against it; eight Republicans, including Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, voted for it. The Seattle Times has statements from members of Washington's Congressional delegation.)

The Washington Post, finding a silver lining in the GOP crossovers, writes,

...a small number but a better show of GOP support than Obama received on key items such as the $787 billion stimulus bill and a $106 billion war-funding bill.

The strongest display of bipartisanship appears to have been on the opposing side.
One House GOP staffer says the bill's dead in the Senate. (I'd have said it's toast, but that invokes an unpleasant global warming image.

Given the close margin and the likely tough-sledding in the Senate, it's timely to recall why this is bad legislation. ShopFloor, the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers, draws on Heritage Foundation research to demonstrate the job losses likely to ensue. 

Economists in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimate that manufacturing jobs will fall on average by 400,000. Peak year unemployment in the manufacturing sector alone rises by almost 1.4 million.

Investor's Business Daily calls the bill a man-made disaster, pointing out the sweeping negative effects on virtually every sector of the economy.

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.

In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel examines the weakeing case for climate change regulation, noting that the global warming tide has again shifted. 

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled.

Today's Seattle Times carries an AP story quoting the president as urging swift passage in the Senate. 

There's no hurry. Senators should take their time. The economic consequences are substantial; the environmental benefits, minimal.