Parsing Barton

Our local Congressman, Joe Barton (R-Arlington), is opposed to cap-and-trade. Yawn. He is so opposed to it that he wrote a whole column about that the other day, with lots of scary assertions, without mentioning so much as a single authority to support any of them.

Though he did offer up Nancy Pelosi:

If you don’t believe me just read what Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week during a trip to China, "We have so much room for improvement. Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory."

Oh, Joe, there you go again!

See, there was a report filed by Associated Press about Pelosi’s recent trip to China, during which she and the Chinese leaders talked about what the two countries could do about global warming.

Now, if you’re Joe Barton trying to drum up a little opposition to anything Obama, and you see a commotion on the Internet involving something that surfaced in the Drudge report, well, it’s duck-on-a-junebug time. And if you can bring in (with appropriate derision) the name of Nancy Pelosi, then you’re definitely in hog heaven.

(Do you know why the Republicans season almost every criticism of the Obama administration with the Speaker’s name? Why they have attacked her for years? What they really have against her? It’s because she’s from — wait for it — SAN FRANCISCO! In CALIFORNIA! Where there are known to be LIBERALS! And GAY PEOPLE!)

Anyway, according to AP, “The trip comes as President Barack Obama's administration has emphasized climate change as a new area where the two governments can broaden already wide-ranging engagement.” The article continues:

The two countries are the biggest emitters of the carbon gases that are causing warming temperatures. … In a meeting Wednesday, the head of China's national legislature, Wu Bangguo, told Pelosi that climate change was a common challenge and that Beijing stood ready to work with Washington. …

In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes.

“We have so much room for improvement," she said. "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory … of how we are taking responsibility.”

Sounds a little different in context, doesn’t it?

Anyway, so it’s about climate change. Well, we lost Joe right there because, he says, “I still have some reservations about the science used to create the theory of man-made global warming.”

This is not new. Back in 2005, when Barton was chairman of the House energy and commerce committee, the New York Times, no less, took editorial note when he disputed the entire concept of global warming and wrote to the acknowledged scientific experts demanding they prove to HIM (an engineer, not a scientist) the worth of their research.

Wrote the Times,

It's going to be hard enough to find common political ground on global warming without the likes of Representative Joe Barton harassing reputable scientists who helped alert the world to the problem in the first place.

Maybe that explains why he didn’t mention that cap-and-trade is a pro-environment program until almost half-way through his column, after he had suggested that (1) CO2, the pollutant in question, is as harmless as the bubbles in your Dr Pepper, (2) controlling it with cap-and-trade would cost a family $3,000 to $4,000 per year (according to “expert analysis” he fails to identify) and (3) that would cause industry to send millions of jobs to other countries.

Just for ducks, I went to factcheck.org, and found this:

Leading Republicans are claiming that President Obama's proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions would cost households as much as $3,100 per year. The Republican National Committee calls it a "massive national energy tax." But the $3,100 figure is a misrepresentation of both Obama's proposal and the study from which the number is derived.

Republicans say they base their figure on a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But one of the authors [of that study] says that the GOP’s use of the study is "simplistic and misleading" and that it ignores key provisions designed to cushion the impact on consumers. The author puts the true added cost of a cap-and-trade system at closer to $800 a year.

That would be about $66 a month. For clean air. And how much do you pay now for your children’s trips to the doctor and asthma meds?

And what about those jobs that Joe claims are going to disappear? Just how does a company that provides energy to American households pull up stakes and move to India or China?

Apparently we’re supposed to just take Joe’s word for it — the word of the guy who tried a few years ago to get the most polluting corner of Ellis county exempted from EPA regulation.

Mr. Barton spends a few paragraphs on Republican efforts to change the legislation, which I suspect was mostly a set-up for calling Democrats “the party of No,” because you have to admit it’s a really catchy phrase and the Republicans need something new to call us now that Democrat Socialist hasn’t caught on.

Near the end of the article, Joe tells us that “Republicans have a plan” that can “lower energy costs and create jobs while protecting the environment,” that “includes conservation of natural resources and increased production of alternative and renewable fuels.”

Wow. Joe, you’ve been holding out on us!