Rep. Fred Upton (MI) wrote a guest piece today for the New Ledger:
There is no escaping the reality of our current economic maladies. The U.S. economy has shed trillions of dollars in recent months, the stock market is languishing in the low 8,000’s, and our national unemployment hovers just below 10 percent. In Michigan, our unemployment is 14.1 percent and climbing, and we are in solid double digits throughout the Rust Belt. And yet, despite our fragile economy, House Democrats have turned a blind eye to reality, pursuing a reckless climate bill that stands to bankrupt America’s working families, with no guarantee of reducing global emissions.
The proposed carbon mandates under consideration would mean that the United States could not emit more in the year 2050 than we emitted in 1910. This is a daunting task considering that in 1910 the United States had only 92 million people, compared to an estimated 420 million in 2050. The only nations in the world today that emit at the proposed levels are struggling nations, such as Belize, Jordan, Haiti, and Somalia. In order to reach the 80 percent reduction required by cap-and-tax, emissions from the transportation sector would have to drop to zero, as would those from ALL electricity generation, and we would still need to reduce all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent.