Imagine the Paperwork
The U.S. House passed a massive 1300 page energy bill today, in much the same way one would pass a kidney stone, 219-211.
The bill establishes a carbon credit system, renewable energy requirements for electrical utilities, performance standards for coal fire plants, energy efficiency requirements for new and retrofit buildings, conservation standards for appliances, financial support for the manufacture of plug-in vehicles, , a large scale vehicle electrification program, research into: carbon sequestration, a smart power grid…
In other words, more red tape than you can shake a stick at. I’ll be lucky if I can fart without having to apply for a permit, not to mention the tremendous bureacracy that will be needed to oversee all of this.
Of course we can take solace in the fact that there’s no way Obama can enforce half of this.
Regardless, this bill pushes the governments tendrils into a giant portion of American life and business, limiting freedoms left and right. Liberals will say that it is necessary for the government to control how we create and consume power in order to save us from global warming. But at what cost to our and liberty? And our wallets?
The silver lining could be that we get off foreign oil. But that could be accomplished with a tax or tariff on oil. And if we were really serious about reducing carbon, we should raise the tax significantly on all fossil fuels. There. Those two sentences would do more than the 1300 page abortion Congress gave us today, and it would do it in the most efficient, free market way possible.
What happened to smarter government?