Inhofe Urges Obama to Focus on Gulf Spill, Not Cap-and-Trade
US Senate EPW, June 14, 2010 [here]
Washington, D.C. - Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today delivered a Senate floor speech urging President Obama to focus on addressing the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history instead of pursuing his cap-and-trade agenda.
I want to speak today on where I think the climate change debate is heading after last Thursday’s vote on the Murkowski resolution. We got a very clear signal in today’s Politico, which reported that President Obama, in his Oval Office address tomorrow night, will seek as part of the response to the BP spill to “put a price on carbon.” Of course, “putting a price on carbon” is Washington-speak for cap-and-trade. This is remarkable: here we have the most significant environmental disaster in our nation’s history, and the President decides now is the time for cap-and-trade, a massive new energy tax, paid for by consumers, working families, farmers, and small businesses; a massive new energy tax that will destroy millions of jobs, in good measure by sending many of them to places like China and India; a massive new energy tax that would make a gallon of gasoline more expensive; and a massive new energy tax that won’t do a thing to stop global warming, but will increase the size of government and give more money for politicians to spend.
Just how that will contain the spill, mitigate the environmental damage, and help those immediately affected by it remains a mystery. Put simply, it won’t do any of those things. But it will damage the economy and make it harder to deal with this crisis. We have a serious incident on our hands. People died, people’s economic livelihoods are at stake, and the environment is being harmed. But instead of Presidential leadership and clear direction, we’re getting pure partisan politics.