Instead of going Green, South Carolina environmentalists are doing nothing but wasting the green.
An article from yesterday’s edition of The Greenville News explains just how the state may throw away taxpayers’ money all in the dubious name of global warming. The story explains how the Climate, Energy and Commerce Advisory Committee presented a report last week to Governor Mark Sanford detailing recommendations the state should take to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. The plan also calls for a number of other eco-friendly recommendations for South Carolina.
So what is the expected environmental benefit should these recommendations be implemented? A reduction of global carbon emissions by a mere two-tenths of one percent.
And what is the predicted cost of the panel’s recommendations? $12 billion, 13, 542 jobs, and $204 million in private investment.
That’s very little bang for quite a lot of taxpayer buck.
Although the panel itself estimated the cost would be $1.6 billion, the South Carolina Policy Council commissioned an independent economic analysis which predicts the much more troubling scenario depicted above.
As the president of the South Carolina Policy Council remarked:
“The recent financial crisis should put policy makers on notice…we cannot afford to implement regulations without analyzing the economic impact.”
These predictions should not only alarm South Carolina residents, but Americans as a whole. The South Carolina government is poised to throw away $12 billion dollars and 13,000 jobs for negligible environmental benefits. The state’s government ought to be spending this money on proven necessities in the here and now. Or, better yet, they ought to give the $12 billion back to the taxpayers.
The economic toll such environmentalist policies would have on the relatively small state of South Carolina would be tremendous and lasting. Local businesses and employers would take a hit many would never recover from. And the fact that South Carolina accounts for a mere 1.6 percent of total American greenhouse gas emissions makes this scenario particularly disconcerting.
South Carolina’s situation should bear witness for the rest of the country as a whole. When the environmentalist lobby seizes control of the legislature in an attempt to push their so-called “eco-friendly” agenda, no amount of money will ever be enough.
Theirs is an insatiable thirst.
Accountability is likewise non-existent. Groups like the Climate, Energy and Commerce Advisory Committee can propose these recommendations without any threat of retribution because the supposed impact—whether real or imagined—is decades away.
If economy-crippling and taxpayer-burdening environmentalist policies succeed on the local level in places like South Carolina, it would be foolish not to expect them on a national—and even international—level. The Lieberman-Warner Cap-and-Trade bill, which failed earlier this past summer, is an example of how the greens seek to “save the planet” at the expense of the nation’s economic well-being. And, although it failed, bills like it will certainly resurface under a more green-leaning President and Congress. More and more money will be demanded, and more and more economic suffering will be yielded.
Just as South Carolina demonstrates, no amount of green is ever Green enough.
