The Cap and Trade Experience

Ben Lieberman (Heritage Foundation, The European Experience with Cap and Trade, July 10, 2009) gave testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate. In his testimony we find all the data necessary to accurately describe any Cap and Trade proposal in the U.S. an unproductive waste of our time and money, with disastrous effect on our economy:

To the limited extent European nations have reduced emissions below business-as-usual levels, it has hurt their economies. Almost every Western European nation has had higher unemployment and energy costs than America, and a weaker overall economy, even as emissions were still rising. Far from seeing evidence of the bright new green economy some are now promising, we are seeing that cap and trade has contributed to the harm. For example, Spain has been cited repeatedly as the example of a successful clean energy economy and source of green jobs, but it is rarely mentioned that Spain currently has 18 percent unemployment.

RTWT.