Do your remember all of those great arguments for support of the Waxman-Markey “let’s rush back to the 1500’s bill?” We were going to save mother earth, we were going to increase jobs, we were going to be less dependent on foreign oil.
Not so much!
A new study done by Ensys Energy finds that rather than import less oil, if Waxman-Markey is passed, we will actually import MORE oil. In fact, the study shows that by 2030 we would likely need to DOUBLE the amount of imported oil!
How can that be? Simple.
If we start taxing production and processing of fossil fuels, less investment will be made into production and processing of fossil fuels. If less investment is made, less outcome will result. All of this is pretty much in line with the designs of the Waxman-Markey bill. The problems comes in that there is no magical product available that can replace fossil fuels in the vast majority of it’s uses. Thus, we dramatically reduce supply but have little reduction in demand. Unless we actually do chose to go back to the 1500’s, we’ll need to replace the production that is no longer happening in the US. According to the study, the shift in production looks like this:
U.S. refining throughput, a measure of productivity, could plummet by as much as 25% (4.4 million barrels per day) and investment in U.S. refining could fall by as much as $90 billion, a decline of 88 percent, by 2030, the EnSys study forecast.
Well, I guess that shoots one of the reasons for the Waxman-Markey bill. Would you like a quick second?
According to the same study, because no magical new power source will be available, the effect of the Waxman-Markey bill will not reduce carbon emissions. All Waxman-Markey will do is shift the carbon emissions from the US to other countries around the world. In other words, only the NIMBY people will get anything out of Waxman-Markey. Yeah, they’ll get something right up to the point that the US economy is hammered because we have a dramatically increasing negative trade balance because we have to import twice as much energy as we used to! Oh, and we’ll lose a bunch of jobs too!
