Concerning Domestic Energy

You need to understand the energy battle going on right now because it will affect you every day in terms of your cost of living and every single thing you buy or consume.  At issue is Obama's cap-and-tax bill which is currently being debated in Congress.  While it may be hard to believe that it could fail with the current constitution of the House and Senate, there is a growing sense of unease in moderate and conservative Dems that Waxman-Markey is bad news, and that spells potentially huge trouble for Obama:

The Hill reports that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill faces growing opposition on Capitol Hill — where it counts.  Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the Agriculture Committee, says that he has a list of 45 Democrats willing to vote against the bill over its ag policies alone.  Peterson says that the list is growing, not shrinking:

More and more Democrats are ready to vote against Speaker Nancy Pelosi's climate change bill, according to a congressional committee chairman who opposes his leader.

The House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said Wednesday that he's at an impasse with the lead sponsor of a climate change bill strongly backed by Pelosi (D-Calif.), and that his list of Democratic members who would join him in voting against the measure is growing rather than shrinking. …

Peterson has warned that the bill put together by Waxman and Energy and Environment subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) will fail if agriculture-related provisions aren't altered, and he's said he has as many as 45 votes on his side. That number of Democratic defections would certainly doom the prospects of passing the bill in the House.

And while the Agriculture chairman said he's working to resolve those differences and not intentionally trying to torpedo the legislation, he noted that skepticism toward the bill is growing, not shrinking.

"I'm just estimating the number of votes that will be against this," Peterson said. "I suspect that the list has grown as more members have gotten a chance to look at this. I mean, my list has grown."

Representatives of various regions of the country are moving toward opposition to this bill because it would wreak vast damage on major constituencies like farmers or coal workers.  The numbers are not particularly complex, nor are they at all vague: if Waxman-Markey becomes law, many jobs will be lost and the economy will take a gigantic hit.  Even left-leaning think tanks like the Brookings Institute predict bad news.  If members of Congress aren't in blindly left-leaning districts, their support for this bill could shape up to be an early announcement for retirement.

But, there's another way.  You haven't heard of it yet because it's a Republican plan, but here are the details:

Last month, the Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis released a study of the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill showing that by 2035 it would raise electricity rates 90 percent, reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $7.4 trillion, and destroy over 1,900,000 jobs.

The Waxman-Markey bill is nothing more than an anti-growth bailout for corporations and a huge tax on consumers. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Yesterday, House conservatives unveiled the American Energy Act which unshackles America's energy producers by allowing energy exploration in Alaska's North Slope, leasing of oil and natural gas fields in the outer continental shelf, and expediting legal challenges to energy development projects. Most importantly, it makes key policy changes that will revive our domestic nuclear industry, including:

• Providing an efficient, predictable, and expedited pathway to permitting new reactors;
• Suspending tariffs on imported reactor components;
• Providing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) the authority to complete its review of the Yucca Mountain repository;
• Repealing the artificial limitations on Yucca Mountain's capacity; and
• Providing an avenue to start recycling spent nuclear fuel in the U.S.

Unlike the massive new energy tax that President Barack Obama has personally admitted would lead energy prices to skyrocket, creating a regulatory framework that will revive our domestic nuclear industry will create thousands of high paying construction and engineering jobs as well as produce cleaner, cheaper energy for the rest of our economy.

What can you do?  Call your Senators and your Rep, and urge them to oppose Obama's cap-and-trade plan.  Then suggest they support the GOP plan that would create jobs (long-term ones, not the temporary construction kind that Obama is trumpeting right now), lower energy costs, and provide a much-needed boost for the current sluggish economy.

If the unease is already there in the Democrats in Congress, it is entirely possible that this can happen.  It will take a determined, informed, and insistent American public to push it over the edge, though.  Make the calls.

There's my two cents.