Home heating prices are set to skyrocket next winter. Heating oil could cost twice as much as it did at the beginning of last winter. Natural gas prices have doubled, and suppliers are requesting a 22 percent rate hike in New Jersey.
Don't worry. The Beltway politicians are doing something about it. They're working on bill that would push those costs even higher.
The bill now before for the Senate calls for a nationwide "cap and trade" system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Cap-and-trade is a bit complicated, but I'll make it simple for you. Unless you have solar heat, you're going to freeze to death or go broke paying your heating bill.
But what if you do have solar heat? Then you'll just freeze to death, at least if you live here in the Northeast. Solar heat won't keep you warm in places like New Jersey. It works only in places where it never gets cold in the first place, like California. And it's Californians who got us into this mess. Back in 1979, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and a lot of other sun-baked singers organized the "no nukes" movement. The movement succeeded in its goal. Unfortunately, its goal was shutting down the only source of carbon-free energy with a realistic chance or replacing fossil fuels.
It was already known at the time that fossil fuels were increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A more sensible Californian, the Nobel Prize-winning Berkeley physicist Glenn Seaborg, had made that point way back in 1969. Seaborg, then the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, argued that nuclear power was preferable to burning fossil fuels because there were "no methods known of eliminating the carbon dioxide that results from combustion."
There still aren't. But if we had gone ahead with nuke plant construction as Seaborg had envisioned, we could have been heating every home in America with electricity by now. Whether that would have had any effect on climate is a complicated question, one we need not go into here. But it sure would have had a positive effect on cutting oil imports, another stated goal of the Beltway crowd. And with enough nuke-generated electricity, we could even power those plug-in hybrid cars that environmentalists dream of.
The objection from the enviros is that we couldn't get nukes built fast enough even if we wanted to. History says otherwise. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared "the long-promised era of economical nuclear power is close at hand." He was referring to a number of nuclear plants that were about to be constructed. Among them was Oyster Creek in Ocean County. By the end of 1969, not long after man first set foot on the moon, Oyster Creek was generating electricity.
If we could accomplish such feats back then, why can't we do so today? Because of the same people who are pushing this cap-and-trade bill. Many environmentalists joined the movement precisely because they didn't like progress. They wanted to return to a simpler era of organic foods and power generated by the sun and the wind. When the anti-global warming movement came along, some environmentalists embraced it not because they wanted to see less carbon dioxide in the air but because they wanted to see less progress in the air.
The problem for politicians is that most Americans embrace that vision only when it remains fuzzy. When it becomes concrete, as it recently did with ethanol and its effect on food costs, Americans reject it overwhelmingly. If you think people are upset about a $4 box of cereal, imagine how they'll greet $800-a-month heating bills. Economists agree that cap-and-trade is really just a disguised carbon tax, with the power companies collecting the tax instead of the government. The idea is to punish the consumer for consuming.
If we already had lots of nukes under construction, cap-and-trade would be a powerful incentive to cut fossil fuel use and switch to electric heat, as Seaborg envisioned. But without nukes, the only solution is to turn your thermostat down -- way down. This was unpopular when President Jimmy Carter suggested it in the late 1970s, and it would be equally unpopular for a President Obama. Americans adapt to high gas prices by spending less time in their cars. But spending less time in your home is not really an option, at least not in mid-February in Jersey.
So on this one, the Senate is putting the cart before the horse, if I may employ a saying that invokes the era envisioned by the enviros. Cutting off fossil fuel use won't work without an alternative. And that alternative is not a solar panel or a windmill.
The liberals better watch out what they wish for with cap-and-trade. They're certainly going to get it.