What Senators Kerry and Boxer Got Wrong About Energy and Cap-and-Trade
Nicolas Loris /
In response to Sarah Palin’s July 14th Washington Post op-ed, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), in their own WaPo op-ed, write they want to “put facts ahead of fiction and real debate ahead of rhetorical bomb-throwing.” Senators Kerry and Boxer will likely be the co-sponsors for the Senate bill to accompany the Waxman-Markey bill passed in the House June 26th.
Kerry and Boxer first refute Palin’s claim that job losses are all but certain. Boxer and Kerry assert that investing billions of dollars in clean energy will jumpstart the economy by creating millions of jobs. They point to a recent report by Robert Pollin, James Heintz and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) that says the bill will create more than 1.7 million jobs.
Heritage economist Karen Campbell dismantles the PERI study saying:
“The study investigates the question of how many jobs would be needed if $150 billion were invested in clean energy over the next 10 years versus how many jobs would be needed if the same amount were invested in carbon-based energy industries. This is not any policy currently being debated today, and therefore is irrelevant to the debate. Secondly, this tells us nothing about the overall economic effect of borrowing money and using it to build clean energy capacity. Instead, they assume the money comes from a helicopter drop in the sky.