More fodder against Waxman / Markey tax plan

As I said here, we are going to be spending TONS of money for not a lot of bang for the buck if this thing passes.  Not only that, there will be TONS of regulations that will hamstring us if we do not fight this thing.

If we were a highly polluted country, I might say – fine, clean it up and then we’ll talk.  The problem is, we have – all kvetching aside from the extreme environmentalists that won’t be happy until every "artificial" molecule is removed (along with much of the human race) – already done so.  Let’s put a little context into place.  Jack Dini over at American Thinker has put a few factoids into place (reformatting and emphasis mine):

• No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank.

•  Another list, ‘The Top Ten of the Dirty Thirty,’ compiled by the Blacksmith Institute of New York compared the toxicity of contamination, the likelihood of it getting into humans and the number of people affected. Places were bumped up in rank if children were impacted. No US or European sites made the list. Sites in China, India and Russia occupied six of the top ten spots.

• Another report states that seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China.

• Of the ten cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, three are in India.

• China has some of the worst pollution problems in the world. Nearly two-thirds of China’s 343 major cities currently fail to meet the nation’s air quality standards. Pollution levels in China’s major cities are 10 to 50 times higher than the worst smoggy day in Los Angeles
  

• China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

As Fareed Zakaria notes,

"The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want: India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch." (7)

• Carbon emissions in India are rising faster than nearly every other country on the planet. Between 1980 and 2006, India’s carbon output increased by 341%, compared to 321% for China, 103% for Brazil 238% for Indonesia and 272% for Pakistan. (9)

Peter Huber sums this up quite well:

"Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions-because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still."

So, we want to slit our collective economic and energy throats….why?