Climate Change Report Precursor to New Energy Tax?
Alarmist. That's what critics are calling the latest White House climate change report saying global warming is already causing extreme weather.
Republicans say President Barack Obama simply will use it to push new regulations on the energy industry.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said those regulations could include a national energy tax.
"And I'm sure he'll get loud cheers from liberal elites, from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets," McConnell said.
He also said that more regulations wouldn't really make a difference.
"Even if we were to enact the kind of national energy regulations the president seems to want so badly, it would be unlikely to meaningfully impact global emissions anyway unless other major industrial nations do the same thing," McConnell said.
"That means getting countries like China and India onboard. The president knows that, the president also knows that much of the pain of imposing such regulations would be born by our own, our own, middle class," he said.
A recent gallup poll found that climate change ranked 14th out of 15 issues. Only 24 percent of the public worries about it a great deal, and 51 percent worry about it a little or not at all.
