“Freedom fuel” awaits conversion into “opportunity juice”
We are closing in on energy legislation in Congress as House Energy Committee Chairman Henry Waxman’s Memorial Day deadline looms.
The issue for the Obama administration and congressional leaders has been convincing voters that the cost of regulation is either very small or unavoidable because of the urgency of global warming problems.
We’ve seen that a growing number of Americans think the hazards of global warming have been exaggerated. This may be because the economic climate makes worrying about carbon dioxide seem like a bit of a luxury. It may also be because the purveyors of global warmism have been so aggressive that it’s probably turned people off.
As my colleague Michael Barone astutely observed warmism, like gun control, has suffered for being so zealously proselytized by America’s elite.
That may be why so many in the enviro-industrial complex are looking for euphemisms to talk about the perceived problem and its purported solutions.
Say climate change, not global warming please.
The small cost argument hasn’t worked very well because the lawmakers from the regions home to people most affected by the president’s global warming fee plan know what the consequences would be and are fighting back — or at least demanding to be paid off with carbon credits to hand out.
Part of the problem for the idea of the transferrable global warming fee concept called cap and trade may be that people aren’t even sure what the term means.
A new survey from Rasmussen Reports shows that less than a quarter of people could even say that cap and trade is related to environmental issues. Most people either weren’t sure what the term meant at all or thought it had to do with Wall Street (Cap and TRADE, get it?).
It’s probably helped greenies to have a euphemism to this point, but as the story gains traction while lawmakers move the bill forward, more people are going to find out thaty cap and trade means global warming fee, things could get a little dicier.
Like an election, regular folks don’t pay much attention to major legislation until they have to. Then things boil down to yes or no questions. Comprehensive immigration reform bounced along in 2007 until the term became synonymous with amnesty… and then it failed.
If today’s cap and trade becomes tomorrow’s global warming fee, then it will be Nancy bar the door.
