Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation by Deneen Borelli

Author:Deneen Borelli [Borelli, Deneen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conservatism, Cultural, Non-Fiction, Politics, U.S.
ISBN: 9781451642865
Amazon: 1451642865
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Green Liberal Lies

We can’t drive our SUV’s and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

—Senator Barack Obama, May 16, 2008

Energy plans put forth by the Obama administration are nothing short of a conspiracy. Chastising gas-guzzling cars and the way in which we heat our homes isn’t about the environment, it is about money. Plan A for the Obama administration to generate green money was cap-and-trade—an emissions tax that would have helped his friends in the business of new energy sources. The government actually had a lot of people duped on cap-and-trade. Newt Gingrich was even on board for doing a commercial with Nancy Pelosi. Obama’s friend General Electric’s Jeff Immelt was getting excited about his investment in wind and solar, so he was on board too, but that didn’t take much effort.

Before Obama took office, Immelt decided to make money on green initiatives despite resistance from both his senior team and his customers. Central to making money on GE’s high-profile ecomagination campaign was making carbon-based energy—fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) more expensive via legislation. A law was needed to force higher energy prices and cap-and-trade legislation was the chosen scheme. Obama was the right man for GE and others looking to get rich on new revenues from the green plot. After all, he’d talked up energy during the campaign.

Cap-and-trade got very close to becoming law, but it wasn’t because of the merits of the plan. It was simply due to the confluence of special-interest influence of big business, environmental activists, and progressive politicians in Congress and the administration. It was heavy-handed and manipulative and came close to working. But there is nothing free market about using legislation to create markets via taxing energy or mandating sales of products. Companies should profit and fail based on their business strategies, not on government backing and support. Period.

The proof of manipulation is in the words. Without laws in place and no new legislation GE can’t make money—Immelt once said, “The only way we’ll ever get a return on our investment in these technologies is if greenhouse gases have a monetary value.” That’s why Immelt and his venture capital pal John Doerr lobbied so hard for cap-and-trade. Immelt did not act alone: There was the U.S. Climate Action Partnership too—a coalition of big-business and environmental groups that lobbied for cap-and-trade. Banks got in on the action too—they wanted cap-and-trade so they could trade carbon credits and offsets on an exchange. Goldman Sachs, for example, took a 10 percent piece of the Chicago Climate Exchange in 2006 and cashed out along with the other investors when its parent company, the Climate Exchange, was sold to the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) for $600 million. The Chicago Carbon Exchange closed its carbon-trading effort in November 2010 after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. It recognized that the new power structure in Washington had eliminated any prospects of profiting from the cap-and-trade scheme.

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