Do you remember the “cap and trade” bill passed by the House?

This is the bill that President Obama said, if passed, would cause energy costs to “skyrocket.”

Well, the rest of that story is that costs of all consumer goods and services would rise, since energy is required in the production and distribution of products and services. Do we really need this energy tax during this recession, along with the increasing cost of health insurance and medical care, government bail-outs, a failed stimulus bill, bloated social programs, loss of oil industry jobs due to Obama’s drilling moratorium, higher taxes on job creators if the Bush tax cuts are not extended in total?

Please, no more “hope and change.”

More to the point, I and many others consider the cap and trade energy tax idea a scam due to the Gore, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Graham, Snowe and McCain false statement that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to global warming, which they now call “man-caused disaster,” since global warming has been debunked.

I offer the following from John Christy, state climatologist for Alabama, who is quoted by Trent Loos in a July 5, 2010, article from “Feedstuffs” journal: “The great secret that environmental activists do not want Americans to know is that because of increased carbon in the earth’s atmosphere, global food production has increased by 16 percent. Carbon is plant food, and plants thrive even in drought conditions with more available carbon.”

Mr. Loos goes on to say that while carbon, at present levels, is making life better, government agencies and legislative bodies are attempting to control every area of our lives to rein in carbon emissions.

I am not a climatologist, but a botanist who studied the role of carbon dioxide from the fourth-grade through graduate school at UGA. But, what do I know? While the arrogant intellectual elite who hang out in Washington took courses at prestigious universities on how to defraud Americans and redistribute money from the working to the non-working, and on how to ignore or subvert the Constitution, I took such courses as ecology, plant physiology, genetics and biochemistry.

Briefly, photosynthesis by green plants and algae converts carbon dioxide and water, using chlorophyll and light energy, into glucose (food), oxygen and more water. Thus, all of the food and most of the oxygen, that aerobic organisms need, are a result of photosynthesis.

Mr. Gore, Mr. Obama, et. al., every carbon atom in your bodies came from carbon dioxide, and the oxygen molecules that you inhale are a result of photosynthesis. If you feel that it is necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, I suggest that you stop or at least limit your exhalations. It wouldn’t save the plant, but it would surely benefit the United States.

I think I understand why Gore wants a cap and trade carbon-taxing bill. He stands to make a lot of money by selling “carbon credits” through the Chicago Energy Trading Board that he and some other stockholders own. Lord knows he needs the money to support his lifestyle, pay alimony, and pay for the silence of the masseuse he allegedly attacked in a hotel.

But what is Obama’s reason for pushing so hard for cap and trade? Maybe it is just more of his Marxist agenda for government control of everything, but could it be more than that?

Dinesh D’Sousa, president of King’s College in New York City, and an Obama researcher, writes on the Forbes Web site on Sept. 27, 2010, “More broadly Obama’s proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America’s carbon consumption.”

D’Sousa also notes that Obama, in speeches to the Senate and to the United Nations, has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world. This explains Obama’s subsidizing drilling off the coast of Brazil while imposing a moratorium on U.S. drilling.

While the Obama agenda is stealing our freedom, killing jobs creation, and leading us to bankruptcy, he cannot pass laws, but the cooperation of the Democrats in the House and Senate, like Pelosi, Reed, Bishop, and others are the enablers of a President bent on living out the dreams of his late father. But we’re not in Kenya anymore, Toto, so let’s cancel the dreams of this father by reducing Democrat power on Capitol Hill.

To my farmer friends in southwest Georgia, Sanford Bishop threw you under the bus with his vote on cap and trade. You help feed and clothe the world, and he’s apparently oblivious to what increased energy costs will do to the whole agriculture industry.

It’s time to vote for a representative, not a ruler, to be our voice in D.C. Vote for Mike Keown; Bishop has been there way too long. Conservatives, we have to be sure and vote; we have to overcome the votes of those enslaved by entitlement programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, both of which recently increased. Let’s restore the democratic republic of our Founders.

Bob Lane
Bainbridge, Ga