Cap-and-trade: Negative impact on Missouri

By Christopher S. Bond

Environmental officials from around the world are meeting at an international climate conference in Copenhagen attempting to reach an international agreement to cut carbon emissions. President Obama and over 100 world leaders will join them this week in hopes of committing the United States to a final agreement.

While I am sure that the new Nobel laureate will bask in the international glow and favorable European attention, I hope he remembers the needs of Missouri families and workers here at home before signing any agreement. I will certainly have them in mind before agreeing to any treaty he asks the U.S. Senate to ratify.

Times are still tough in Missouri and across the nation. Our latest national unemployment rate of 10 percent shows, in part, how workers are so discouraged that many stopped looking for new jobs. On top of that, experts predict that cap-and-trade will kill over 2 million jobs nationwide, many of them blue-collar manufacturing on which middle-income Missouri families depend.

This was part of the reason for bipartisan opposition to the cap-and-trade bill considered by the Senate Environment Public Works Committee this fall. I and my colleagues also did not want to impose what would feel like huge new energy taxes on family heating, power and gasoline bills.

Even though cap-and-trade climate legislation is stalled in the Senate, advocates are trying to go through the back door with new government regulations. Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a new carbon regulation that will result in expensive and burdensome requirements on not only manufacturing facilities, but also farms, universities, hospitals, commercial and apartment buildings, even bakeries and doughnut shops.

The most discouraging thing to me is that all of this economic pain would come with no environmental gain. Scientists tell us that because carbon emissions are emitted around the world, the U.S. acting alone without emissions cuts from China and other major emitting countries will have no measurable impact on world temperatures.

Which brings us to Copenhagen, where advocates hope for a new international agreement to cut climate emissions. Unfortunately, the conference has already failed before it started. While the politicians will sign some kind of agreement and offer each other platitudes, major emitters like China and India have already said they will not cut their own emissions.

China has pledged to slow the growth of its carbon emissions, but according to experts will emit over 70 percent more carbon by 2020 because of their rapidly expanding economy. India refuses to allow its slow growth proposal to be enforceable or verifiable, which means that not only does it not want to be held to its proposal, it does not even want the world to know whether it is meeting its proposal or not.

What is certain is that any international agreement binding the U.S. but letting China and India off the hook will send U.S. jobs overseas. An agreement forcing the U.S. to abandon affordable energy sources, like the coal-based power that fuels Missouri's mills and assembly lines as well as families' heating needs, will impose job-killing cost increases. America will be left holding the expensive energy bag while China and India exploit their cheap labor and cheap energy advantages to take energy-dependent U.S. jobs. We are seeing that already with green energy mandates and reports of key components for wind farms coming from cheaper manufacturing locations in China.

While I oppose unfair U.S. legislation or international climate agreements, I do think we can cut carbon emissions without killing jobs and raising energy taxes. We can increase zero-carbon nuclear power, low-carbon biofuels, low-carbon hybrid and electric car technology, low-carbon clean coal, clean-burning natural gas off our shores and under our lands, even energy efficiency. That is much better than going around Congress with government regulations or going overseas to agree to what Congress will not.

Christopher S. Bond represents Missouri in the U.S. Senate.