Patrick McIlheran looks at the implications of Climategate for Wisconsin, where the governor seems about to double down.
The Governor's Task Force on Global Warming already has mapped out ideas lawmakers will try to enact. A free-market think tank, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, got outside experts, economists at Suffolk University in Boston, to price this. Result: Even when you reckon what we'll save not building power plants, these dreams will cost plenty.
For instance, cars would cost, net, about $1,000 more each. Fuel prices would jump, since we'd refuse Canadian oil, so transport costs would rise 26%. Say you've got a plug-in hybrid instead: Your power costs would leap, since utilities must install lots of windmills to get a quarter of their power from "renewables." That alone adds $1 billion to utility bills every year through 2025.
Not just your bill, either. The costs bake into everything you buy. The result, working off the task force's own assumptions, is that Wisconsinites will earn $7.9 billion less, or about $1,000 in annual real disposable income per woman, man and infant, by 2020.
And this is just explicit mandate costs, not their depressing effects on the economy. It results from a 22% cut in emissions, not the 83% tossed around by our president.
And the benefits side of the equation now is weakening.
We must tolerate such impoverishment, we are told, because a consensus of scientists predict that disaster looms. But 3,000 or so e-mails between leading climate researchers at one of the world's premier predictors of doom, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, undermine this....
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Hank - Dec 06, 2009 3:52 PM
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