Why are Businesses Helping to Shape a Cap and Trade Bill That will Inevitably Hurt Them?
Nicolas Loris /
Someone please answer that question.
Let’s start with this: a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds that food and energy demand will outpace production to meet those needs over the next several years. The need for greater energy and food production and the jobs that could be created from seeking to meet that need is just the latest example of the opportunity costs associated with cap and trade.
One might imagine that these increased energy demands would create a huge economic opening for American firms to fill a gap in demand and address a desperate need borne heavily by the world’s poor. Instead, Congress is devising a regulatory scheme that will severely disadvantage almost all American firms as they compete to provide the best solutions to emerging world problems.
The Wall Street Journal was onto something when they said yesterday that the legislation requires little short of “destroy[ing] the discipline of economics.” Cap and trade results in immediate job losses to manufacturing, construction, and other major sectors of the economy, but that’s not the end of the story. It will also significantly constrain U.S. firms in taking advantage of opportunities for growth through enormous new regulatory hurdles, not to mention skyrocketing energy costs that will raise the cost of investing in new capital projects. Knowing this, the cap and trade bill evolved into a convoluted, lobbyist-constructed bill: