Have you heard the story of the preacher and the bootlegger? It’s a story where two different sets of moral views cause the preacher and the bootlegger to vote for the same thing. The preacher wants to ban booze. He votes for prohibition. So does the bootlegger, because his business depends on prohibition.
So we have the preacher and the bootlegger saga underway for those favoring the imposition of Cap and Trade legislation. The greenie wants to ban CO2 and he believes that by imposing cap and trade, his desire will be accomplish. The corporate chief wants to ban CO2 because he believes his nuclear generated power will become a vast source of income for his company. So, if you are John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, you might want to promote the Kerry/Liebermann cap and trade bill in order to make more money. According to the Daily Caller blog, John Rowe said in an interview with Forbes magazine:
“Exelon needs that legislation to happen sooner rather than later. Without a carbon price of some sort, Exelon’s fortunes aren’t so bright…. Rowe acknowledges [that] ‘There’s nothing that’s going to drive Exelon’s profit in the next couple of years wildly. It just isn’t going to happen.’ Except, of course, carbon legislation. And because of that, the company views spending on lobbying for legislation almost like a capital expense.”
Around the same time as those Exelon revelations, Mike Morris, the CEO of America’s largest coal burning utility, American Electric Power (AEP), told Forbes that the scheme—which, by chance he, too, is promoting—would add billions in additional costs to his company, certainly, but he chuckled at the beauty of it: they get to pass those billions on to the ratepayer, with a little something on top for themselves. Under cost-recovery schemes giving a percentage for their troubles, the more it costs, the better.
These billions, which come from you—at least so long you don’t or can’t leave the energy companies, as Morris notes in his interview—would also in some cases be for no additional capital expenditure or other outlays or obligations on their part, outside of the army of lobbyists—er—”public affairs specialists,” working feverishly to get this burden enacted into law. “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.”
One notes that Conoco-Phillips was for the House passed Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill until they discovered that the cost of US produced gasoline (something they make a lot of) would be made non-competitive versus imported gasoline. So then they were against the Waxman-Markey bill. The new bill—Kerry-Lieberman– applies import duties on imported gasoline. Wonder of wonders, they are now for this one.
GE stands to gain by the wind and solar requirements in this new law, one would surmise, as they do make wind turbines. Some companies are fully into alternate fuels, such as biodiesel or ethanol. They have businesses where they have a technological advantage, that will be profitable when fossil fuels are being arbitrarily priced out of the market. Hasn’t President Obama promised to drive the coal operations out of business, by the way?
We have a number of companies, all expecting to profit from the imposition of cap and trade legislation. The sponsors of the bill are spieling these companies as enlightened, good protectors of the global. Well just like the bootlegger, one has to realize what are their real motives. They support cap and trade not based on science but on a short-term market place advantage. They are delusional if they are not aware that in the long run, this system will destroy them too.
Do you think that these companies are looking out for your interests when they back Cap and Trade?
See also AGW is Dead–Long live Cap&Trade-Part 1
AGW is Dead–Cap &Trade Profiteers-Part 2
Cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 