Rep. Spencer Bachus (AL) today came out against the way Democrats are rushing a costly cap and tax energy bill through Congress. Read an excerpt of his blog post on Red County.com:
The Democrat leadership is preventing the public from learning important details about the cap and tax plan by bypassing several key committees.
As a Ranking Member on the Financial Services Committee, I called for hearings on the bill's creation of a massive trading scheme for carbon emissions.It sounds altogether too familiar - a brand new, hard to price, vast convoluted market of carbon derivatives. And if these warnings are correct, one that could certainly pose a systemic risk in the financial markets. In addition, this bill provides for tree-planting projects to be used as carbon offsets. But the trees could be in Brazil or Borneo. If there is a tree-planting project in Brazil, worthy as that may be, should American taxpayers pay for it? In addition, such projects, particularly in remote or developing countries, are notoriously difficult to confirm and monitor. The legal description of the land could be changed and offsets securitized many times. We found that even in the U.S., with a established rule of law and well-established regulatory system, the subprime mortgage market was subject to countless different schemes and manipulation.