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Climate bill passes in the House

June 29, 2009 by Keith Lockitch

In my last post, I mentioned I was heading to the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC. (I’ll report on the conference soon.)

I had noted the timeliness of the event, given that Congress was working on a bill imposing a cap-and-trade system in the United States (along with a host of other disastrous government interventions), and I expressed hope that the event might “inject a measure of reason into the Congressional debate before the bill comes up for a vote.”

Well, even a measure of reason is probably too much to expect of today’s political bodies. The bill passed in the House last Friday. The bill’s Congressional opponents (some of whom spoke at the Heartland conference) put up a determined fight, and it passed by an extremely narrow margin, 219 to 212, but it passed nevertheless.  

This moves us one step closer to total government control over our production and use of energy, which fuels every aspect of our economy and makes possible the unprecedented quality of life we enjoy today. Even if it were provably true that human activity was causing large-scale changes to the earth’s climate (which it’s not), how is that a justification for undermining industrial civilization by an assault on economic freedom and on the continued development of industrial-scale energy?

With “solutions” like this, who needs problems?

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