Published: August 05, 2009 05:38 pm      

Letters to the editor - Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009

Cap-and-trade program not needed

Cap-and-trade is not a free market system. A free market system is not imposed by the government and forced to every man, woman and child in the country.

Cap-and-trade is nothing more than a way for the environmentalists to impose their misguided beliefs on the rest of society, under the guise of the common good.

There is a big difference between scrubbing your stack emissions and fundamentally changing the way you run your business. Anyone who doesn’t think that the national cap on sulfur dioxide emissions didn’t change utility rates or create a poor business environment, isn’t paying utility bills or watching jobs go overseas due to the cost of meeting all the rules and regulations imposed here and not over there.

The only people who will profit from cap-and-trade are the people who sell credits. Who decides who gets to do that and what each cap will be? This is just another government-run program sure to fail as they all do.

Let’s get to the real problem with Mr. Parson’s argument. We have been hearing about global warming for more than a decade now. When Al Gore first brought this up, he said we had less than 10 years to stop global disaster. Here we are more than 10 years later and not one of the things predicted has come to fruition. No change in the natural hurricane cycles, no rising sea levels, no inundated islands or cities along the coast. No changes in plant or animal behavior. The shortfall of water for agriculture and drinking is not due to less water because of global warming but an increase of people in certain areas of the country using more and more of what is a limited resource, particularly in the western and southern states.

Carbon dioxide makes up only four-tenths of 1 percent of the atmosphere. All of man-made activity, that includes breathing, accounts for less than one-fourth of that. If man ceased to exist tomorrow, the change in the world’s carbon dioxide output would only change by one-tenth of 1 percent. Does anyone really believe that would make any difference in the earth’s climate?

If global warming was caused by man, shouldn’t the warming get worse every year as more and more people inhabit the Earth. Yet the average temperature hasn’t gone up since 1998, and the average temperature is actually down a slight amount since 2001.

Paleo-climatelogists who actually study the earth’s climate over millions of years and not just since 1886 will tell you that unlike Al Gore and Mr. Parsons would have you believe, that higher carbon dioxide levels do not cause higher temperatures but that higher temperatures actually cause higher carbon dioxide levels. This little fact completely disputes their cause-and-effect theory.

Mr. Parsons brings up the polar bears. Unfortunately for him, the facts say that not only are the polar bears not drowning due to global warming, but that there are currently more polar bears than at any time in recorded history and the number is increasing yearly.

In the mid-1800s, the earth came out of what was called the Little Ice Age. If you come out of an ice age, wouldn’t you logically expect some rise in global temps.

Please do not let people like this frame an argument in the old “are you still beating your wife” argument. Read both sides of the argument, but then just use a little common sense.

Bob Fortson, Kokomo

Call renewed to stop federal taxes

Cash For Clunkers is bad, because Cash For Clunkers is wasteful (MUDA). 

But, Cash For Clunkers stimulated. CFC stimulated the citizens to consume. I hope our DC Dummies learn a lesson from CFC and do what I told them to do six months ago. Stop Federal taxes for one month.

(1) Make a plan to completely eliminate all citizens’ and corporations’ federal taxes (input) for one trial month, while reducing federal government expenses (output) through cost reductions, pay cuts across the government board, and personnel layoffs forever. One year/12 months = 8.3 percent, less than the citizens unemployment rate.

(2) Do it. (or lose your leadership job)

(3) Check if the citizens like it, and if it successfully stimulated the economy.

(4) Repeat as needed (see step 1).

Patrick E. Harvey, Peru