I ran across a great one this morning.  John McClure, vice president of governmental affairs and general counsel for the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) compared the new federal energy policy act which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hopes to vote on by Friday to putting a car cruising down the interstate at high speed “into reverse”.

If you survive such an incident, you are likely to have a lot of spare parts scattered over a mile or so of highway.  You no longer will have a drivable automobile.  That is precisely what H.R. 2454 with its “carbon cap-and-trade” system will do to the U.S. utility industry. 

McClure pointed out that places like Indianapolis, which is 100 percent reliant on fossil fuels for energy production will “have a significant impact”.  The NPPD board, he noted, is not opposed to “green energy” and is even moving aggressively to build windmills.  The NPPD gets about 60 percent of its generation from fossil fuels, but is taking a “gradual approach by attempting to add at least 80 megawatts of more wind energy to its generation portfolio approximately every other year and the newest wind farm could be constructed by 2010.”

The crux of McClure’s argument against H.R. 2454, indeed the entire Obama Administration and Congressional push for cap-and-trade is that there are too many moving parts that aren’t likely to react very well to being thrown into reverse.  For one thing, he said, “Let’s not mandate a solution before the technology is in place.  There is no technology commercially available that you can put on a coal plant today and take out carbon emissions.”

To McClure’s concerns, I would add that the entire raison d’etre for all of this is not even proven—that anthropogenic global warming even exists.  McClure notes that the cost of cap-and-trade to American business and residential electricity users is projected to be anywhere between 35-to-100 percent “in additional costs for energy production.”

And, higher energy production costs will drive up the costs of virtually everything made or consumed by a like percentage.  “Our focus is on realistic ways to reduce carbon emissions, but we also want to be mindful of the financial impact on customers and industry,” McClure said.  “This is the biggest issue facing our industry.”

That this is the “biggest issue facing our industry” is a vast understatement.  It’s the biggest issue facing the nation today.  Although McClure was polite and didn’t point out that Pelosi and Henry Waxman, the committee chair for this potential car wreck, both are from California, which single-handedly derailed “deregulation” in the early part of this century by conceiving that it would be a good idea to freeze residential rates for electricity while letting wholesale rates float.  That brilliant idea bankrupted the state’s largest utility.  Now these same players are at it again on a national scale.

I realize the environazis to whom Pelosi, Waxman and the entire Democrat party are largely beholden would prefer that mankind didn’t pollute their pristine world by living here.  But we do and it wouldn’t hurt them to remember occasionally that consumers pay their bloated salaries, expense accounts and golden pension plans.  Hit those consumers with a doubling of the price of everything and hopefully some sanity will prevail and they can be sent back to California and sit in their own cold and dark.

The utility industry probably is a lost cause at this point.  California is about to do it to us again by throwing the whole thing into reverse.  About the only thing we can do now is duck.  There are going to be lots of mangled spare parts flying around randomly at very high speed.