“Two weeks after his election as president, Barack Obama said, ‘Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.’ Shortly thereafter, more than 100 scientists signed a newspaper advertisement responding, ‘With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.’ The scientists, from places as varied and esteemed as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the American Physical Society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, said the ‘case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.’
But even many who are not skeptical about global warming found things to dislike in ACES. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against it, said, ‘It won’t address the problem. In fact, it might make the problem worse.’ Kucinich faulted the bill’s ‘Enron-style accounting methods’ and allocation of $60 billion for Carbon Capture and Sequestration, ‘a single technology which may or may not work.’ Kucinich faulted the corporate welfare embedded in the bill, saying that the “trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors,’ with any benefits ‘passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.’
‘I take climate change seriously,’ libertarian economist Megan McArdle wrote last week. But she said the projections for ACES’s ‘effect on global warming are entirely negligible,’ and any hope that U.S. passage of the bill will ‘persuade China and India to get on board’ is ‘entirely wishful thinking on the part of American environmentalists. China is not going to let its citizens languish in subsistence farming because 30 years from now, some computer models say there will be some not-well-specified bad effects from high temperatures. Nor is India.'” (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)