Testimony before the Committee on Energy and Commerce on the draft American Clean Energy and Security Act

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Introduction:
Chairman Waxman, Chairman Markey, and Members of the Committee, thank
you for inviting me to testify today on the draft bill, “the American
Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” My name is Myron Ebell, and I
am director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit, non-partisan public policy
institute that focuses on regulatory issues from a free-market and
limited-government perspective. CEI
has been actively involved in energy and global warming issues for two
decades. President and founder Fred Smith attended the 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change was negotiated, and the Third Conference of the
Parties in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, where the Kyoto Protocol was
negotiated. As an accredited NGO, I and several of my colleagues have attended a number of the succeeding Conferences of the Parties to the UNFCCC. Over the years, CEI
has issued policy papers and been involved in the public policy debate
on most of the major issues related to energy and global warming.

Just to be clear about where we stand, CEI
opposed ratification of the Framework Convention and the Kyoto
Protocol. We also oppose all domestic measures to ration energy through
mandates or taxes. This includes the draft bill, which is the subject
of today’s hearing. Each and every title is fundamentally misguided. In
our judgment, the American Clean Energy and Security Act cannot be
improved enough to warrant enactment. It should not be introduced. If
it is introduced, it should be defeated.