By Oregon Live

These are hard times. Unemployment is high and getting worse, savings and home values have collapsed, and our government is spending money like a drunken sailor. Deficits are at record highs with no end in sight. Businesses are closing, Americans are concerned, but Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University, argues we should do more to destroy our economy

“We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure,” Ehrlich wrote in 2007.

If that’s the goal, the best way to destroy a nation is to destroy its energy industries. The “cap-and-trade” Waxman-Markley climate change bill is a massive energy tax. This 1,427-page economic suicide act passed the House in July without anyone even being able to read it.

Economists agree that raising taxes in a recession is a job killer. Well, cutting off energy is a people killer. A nation in recession with a declining population will use less energy. Some say this is good.

But the cap-and-trade bill’s promoters don’t talk about prosperity, population control or freedom. Instead, a massive propaganda campaign has been mounted to make the public fearful of global warming. Al Gore’s movie of drowning polar bears started it, but biased global warming science has been financed with our tax dollars: So far $79 billion.

The cap-and-trade tax would hit 100 percent of Americans. The Heritage Foundation has estimated the cost at $3,000 per year per family from 2012-2035. To sell your home, the windows, appliances, heating, air conditioning, and insulation would have to be inspected and approved for compliance with not-yet-defined federal energy standards. Trading carbon credits, a colossal failure in the European Union, is a derivative scheme and an invitation to fraud: completely intangible, unregulated and impossible to track.

As to global warming: It’s not happening. Though carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is slowly increasing, there has been no warming for the past 10 years. For the past seven it’s been getting cooler. Thousands of scientists all over the world are skeptical of Gore’s theory.

Cap and trade is economic suicide. It will severely damage the economic climate without improving the weather one bit.

John D. Trudel is founder of The Trudel Group in Newberg.