Progress Illinois

Rep. John Shimkus and his colleagues in the American Energy Solutions Group are taking their climate change denialism on the road. The Republican congressman, who infamously claimed that "the earth will end only when God declares its time to be over" during congressional hearings earlier this year and has since launched a hyperbolic and factually inaccurate campaign against cap-and-trade legislation, announced yesterday that he and fellow Republicans will talk to voters in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and California about their concerns with the Democratic energy bill currently circulating in Washington.

Their tour kicked off with an unofficial congressional hearing on Capitol Hill. To be sure, this was no even-handed panel; as Media Matters documents, all eight witnesses boast heavy ties to the oil industry. But Shimkus was seemingly satisfied with what he heard. “To develop a positive plan, you have to know the failures of the current plan,” Shimkus told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “and I think those were exposed today.”

What are those flaws? Shimkus explains:

“If you want to tax carbon emissions, the simplest most cost-efficient and most transparent means would be a carbon tax but the liberal Democrats are unwilling to go in that direction because the public will really know what the cost will be,” Shimkus said.

It's arguable whether a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax is a more preferable policy, but if the carbon permits are auctioned off -- as President Obama prefers -- they are effectively identical.

Furthermore, unpriced emissions have an enormous social cost that is currently hidden. They also provide a competitive advantage to companies that produce or are reliant on fossil fuels. Cap-and-trade legislation would expose the public to the real cost of pollution while making alternatives more competitive. Will prices jump for products and services that rely on carbon inputs? At least in the short term, sure. But auctioning the permits and rebating the revenue would shield middle- and working-class people from the spike. And they certainly wouldn't pay an additional $3,100 a year in additional taxes, as Shimkus and others have claimed.

To defend against what Indiana Republican Mike Pence called "an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by the liberals in Washington D.C.," Shimkus and GOP leaders continue to tout their “all-of-the-above” approach to energy. If legislative leaders use his failed ENERGY VISION Act as a prompt, they might want to clear up some of the mathematical errors we found last year.