Planning a newer New Deal and a new Depression to go with it

This is about the "Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act," S. 2191.

In the 1930's the Government needed to control everything because the economy was bad. In the coming years the Government will need to control everything because the environment might be getting bad. I've lately been reading The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, which chronicles ways in which government control of everything during the Great Depression made matters worse. Now here come some very smart people (might one call them a "brain trust?") promising to destroy the economy in the name of saving the environment. This is supposed to be a Good Thing. Power Line links to the WSJ and the Chamber of Commerce. The horrifying chart of the proposed new bureaucracy is even more horrifying viewed full size. (Inline update: That chart is a part of an even larger chart! Thanks to Chris Horner at Planet Gore.) The size of this proposal is like one of those things that Carl Sagan wrote about, incomprehensibly enormous. Billions and billions of billions and billions.

Some of these Congressmen who write these regulations don't seem to realize that every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher, is someone who is not doing something constructive, but something obstructive. Or … do they? How can such smart people be so dumb? That's a rhetorical question.

Reducing the carbon footprint (click for bigger):


Update: Similar thinking in the British Parliament.

Are you ready for WW2-style energy rationing?

Environment Minister Hilary Benn again rebuffed calls this week for WW2-style energy rationing to return to the UK. He was responding to a Select Committee report urging ministers to issue 45 million Britons with an energy trading "credit card" - a mammoth techno-bureaucratic exercise costing several billions of pounds a year to operate.

[…]

However prettily the MPs would like to dress up rationing, it's fundamentally a form of social coercion designed to make people less comfortable than they were before. Wartime rationing needs a war-sized scare, and with the climate stubbornly refusing to conform to the computer models (which predict catastrophe) that looks like an impossible prospect.

(via Jerry Pournelle's mail.)

Another update: S. Weasel has posted on this, with a charming graphic.