Taxing Water and a Cool $3 Trillion

Tribune parrots the Left's talking points on global warming in a front page story today. Question for Tribune--do you want more costly and less reliable fuel? In the cold of winter, in the heat of summer? Let's talk about this cap and trade idea and other do-gooder alarmism. Hugh Hewitt already has:

HH: Now Stephen Hayward, you know this subject up and down. What do you make of John McCain’s assertion that global warming is leading to violent weather patterns which are on the increase?

SH: Well, you know, I suppose it’s too much to expect that a politician actually keeps up with the day to day science on this. And this is something I tell people all the time, is that the media reports all the scary stuff, and they never report the anti-scary stuff. And when I say anti-scary, there’s a steady stream of scientific research that appears almost daily that calls into question all these familiar assertions. So for example, there’s an article out two days ago in the Geophysical Research Letters, one of the premier journals of this subject. The title of the article is called Global Warming and the United States Landfalling Hurricanes. And what is says is, look, hurricanes striking the United States have actually been going down. And the reason they’ve been going down is that oddly enough, global warming, which I say is happening, although I think it’s less severe than McCain says, increases wind shear. Now you’ve got to follow the bouncing ball here. Wind shear actually diminishes hurricane activity and tears them apart. That’s why, by the way, we have fewer hurricanes in years we have high El Nino conditions out in the Pacific. So I mean, McCain just simply doesn’t know what the facts are, and by the way, this isn’t the only study that said that. Even the UN body, the Inter-governmental Panel On Climate Change, the IPCC, says the same thing in their 3,000 page report, if any reporter would ever trouble to read the whole thing.

[snip]

Now by the way, one estimate by a couple of very good economists at Princeton suggest that staying even, meaning holding our greenhouse gas emissions where they are now, with our growing economy and population, would cost at least $3 trillion, trillion with a T dollars, over the next twenty years.

And while we're at it, Suitably Flip is suitably flip on the hurricane business. Sorry, the science isn't settled. Newsbusters covers a New York Times New Year's story:

Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year's end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record - it was actually lower than any year since 2001 - the BBC confidently proclaimed, "2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

There's more.

Of course this eco-zealotry of the Left is seized on by the pols--usually Dems, as the latest excuse to raise taxes. In Chicago this has taken the form of a tax on bottled water, which even some liberals view as arbitrary, shopping at our local Jewel across the border. Heartland Institute:

On January 4 the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court to overturn the tax. Other plaintiffs in the suit include the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, Illinois Food Retailers Association, and American Beverage Association.

"When you look at Chicago, with the taxes and regulations and bureaucracy that people have to put up with, and you hear complaints that there aren't enough grocery stores, this tax is another reason people don't open groceries in the city," said Tim Bramlet, executive director of the Illinois Beverage Association.

"Store owners can go to the suburbs and don't have to put up with this," Bramlet said. "It's another burden to collect and pay the tax, not to mention it will discourage sales of bottled water in the city. And that will probably reduce sales of other items that people buy with water. Anyone who lives near the boundary of the city can easily go outside the city and save money."

The American Spectator, The Tax Foundation. Of course this will hurt small business, and also make it more difficult for poorer people to buy reasonably priced groceries in their neighborhoods. But well-heeled liberals can feel good about this, even as they drive to the suburbs to evade the tax.

It's no wonder people are leaving the state. Or failing that, let's join in a rousing chorus with Minnesotans for Global Warming.

UPDATE: A reader emails that Charlie Sykes has been covering this same kind of idiocy next door in Wisconsin:

Is Madison suffering from a smugness deficit? Have the smoking bans lost their rush of moral superiority? Has the railing against phosphorus lost its panache? Is it no longer enough to sport bumper stickers that proclaim: “My Other Car is a Tibetan Yak?”

Or has Madison simply decided to move beyond satire?

The latest Madison idea: banning bottled water, or at least its sale at public events. To save the planet, no less.

Meanwhile, in Britain they're turning out the lights.

UPDATE: Thank God NYC Mayor Bloomberg isn't running. NY Sun: "Mayor compares threat of global warming to terrorism." Really? He's addressing a climate change conference at the UN :

Other participants in the conference called for a "war" against climate change, in which the United Nations would serve as a front-line combatant.

Good luck with that. Maybe in the style of Waterkeeper Warrior Bobby Kennedy Jr. More hilarity:

"Terrorists kill people. Weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill an enormous amount of people," Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after addressing the U.N. General Assembly, but "global warming in the long term has the potential to kill everybody."

Channeling that seer Joycelyn Elders. To paraphrase the Clintons' esteemed Surgeon General from Arkansas...

"In the long run, we'll all probably die of something anyway".

P.S. Maybe he's angling for a foreign policy job with Obama:

Like smoking, Mr. Bloomberg said, these are preventable killers. "We should go after terrorists every place in this world, find them and kill them, plain and simple," he said.

Who knew?