Al Gore: Your Landlord

So, Americans think Kentuckians don't wear shoes, invented the tooth brush for obvious reasons and have the middle name of Huckleberry. Well, Leland Conway of the Advocate-Messenger out of Danville K-y has his finger on the pulse. Read it and weep, folks. It ain't a done deal yet but Cap and Tax is getting very close.

Just how bad is cap-and-trade for Kentucky and America? If it becomes law, it will provide every American with a new interior decorator - Al Gore. Bet you didn't know that was included in the deal, did you?
It will force all of us to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade our homes with new energy efficient windows, doors and even appliances before we sell or borrow against equity.
Home builders are in trouble, too. Already struggling to sell the houses they are building, they'll have to retrofit all of the homes they currently have on the market to bring their energy efficiency levels up by 30 percent. Since many builders already use the latest, most energy efficient materials, how exactly is this going to be accomplished?
Cap-and-trade requires the rest of the country to live up to California's energy standards. It doesn't take long to figure out where that has gotten them. By the way, say good-bye to that wood burning fireplace - it just doesn't fit into Al Gore's new interior design scheme for your home.
Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson recently wrote in the National Review Online that this bill requires any project it mandates to be completed using Davis-Bacon wages, effectively excluding America's small businesses from competing for contracts. So much for economic stimulus for the little guy.
Clean coal will increase energy bills
Remember when Congressman Ben Chandler, who voted for the bill, said he was proud because he scored a $60 billion dollar pork barrel investment for "clean coal?" This new bill will impose performance standards on new coal-fired power plants to encourage the adoption of carbon-capture technology. That means Kentuckians will see much higher electricity bills because of the efficiency losses associated with carbon capture. Ouch.
Spruiell and Williamson also point out that the bill instructs the EPA to regulate emissions from sources such as cars, trucks, buses, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, boats, planes and trains. In other words, welcome to government regulation of everything in your life.
So far, the only jobs that this bill actually creates are the thousands of new government bureaucrats who will run the dozens of new taxpayer funded agencies whose purpose it is to slow down America's economy, get in the way of everything we do, and require a permit for just about everything under the sun.
I have an idea. Instead of these new "wind farms" and "bio-whatever" power plants they intend to build for us, why doesn't someone just figure out a way to attach a generator to our Founding Father's graves? I bet we'd find them all rolling over in them so fast that we could power several major American cities with the excess energy.
Perhaps the craziest thing of all about cap-and-trade is that even the Environmental Protection Agency admits that this bill won't do much to clean up the environment.
The fact is, in countries where this has been tried, pollution levels have stayed the same or risen because cap-and-trade schemes actually sanction pollution. You pay a medieval-style indulgence, and keep on doing what you were doing.
The problem is, the cost for that indulgence is passed on to the consumer, resulting in higher priced everything, massive job losses and forcing many small businesses that can't afford to retrofit and pay for carbon credits to close their doors.
Cap-and-trade is an incredibly bad idea. Worst of all, the burden for it falls squarely on what used to be the American middle class, and it does absolutely nothing to clean up the environment. America is the Titanic, and cap-and-trade is the iceberg.