Bobby Hurt is pissing me off yet again.

Rep Robert Hurt  of Virginia's 5th Congressional District (our Represntative from Wichita) sends out a weekly email, touting the Kleptocrat party talking points.  Last week, he was calling our President bad names.  I sent a quick note there, especially in light of his pride in the interference in the private property rights of a local entity.  Didn't blog it.  This week it's a repeat of the "House Republicans have paved the way for the rape of our communities and wage-enslavement of our neighbors, BUT THE SENATE WON'T YIELD" trope that shows up every few weeks, on slow news weeks (or embarrassing rich news weeks).

I just cutting and pasting what I wrote.  Maybe a few links thrown in for context...........

I've written in the past advocating private and public infrastructure investment.  It would be nice to see a US Govt balance sheet where debt was balanced against income-generating assets.  Then your 17 Trillion figure would be, hopefully, a net positive, and not a bankrupt government.

But my concern is the recent report that greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta oil sands are projected to exceed by a factor of three prior projections.  And yet, with our cooperation or without -- say a British Columbia route to China or a Saskatchewan route to Europe -- extraction, refining, and combustion will proceed.  Those gases are there, like it or not.  (OR pretend it doesn't matter or not).

TAX CARBON!!!  Build the pipeline, and tax carbon.  Tax Western Virginia coal carbon.  Tax the release of methane by fracking operations.  Tax cow flatulence.  Don't indemnify groundwater contamination and other externalities of extraction and transport.  In fact, write laws which make it a rebuttable presumption that contamination originates from extractive use or transportation spill of the contaminating substances, with specific, preferably treble penalties.  PAY AT THE PUMP!!!

Stop the subsidizing of harmful externalities.  Create systems of compensation and remediation.  Then, we will end up paying more money for our BTUs, entirely voluntary, when we pay at the pump.  The system you are perpetuating with your very un-Republican objection to cap and trade, is one of violent coercion where I am enslaved by the consumer of cheap energy, who pollutes my air, my water, my vistas, my sacred natural spaces, even the very weather, to keep fuel cheap, at his neighbor's expense.  I should think Ayn Rand would abhor the kind of coercive violence you have been advocating.  And certainly Pope Francis has expressed his explicit abhorrence.

TAX CARBON!!!  perhaps Cap and Trade.  PAY AT THE PUMP!!! These are not socialist values.  THESE ARE CHRISTIAN AND AMERICAN VALUES.  INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE -- the Whig and Republican parties were born on that value.  In times of cheap capital -- Where are the investments in low-unit-cost, large-capital energy production and conservation projects?  Private projects? You, in your committee assignments, have and have squandered opportunities to alter that.  Where is the information, transportation, electrical distribution, waste disposal, water impound, and other investment, both public and private?  Why is Congress wanting to see America squander the Whig/Republican ethic that fed our prosperity?  Why is Congress facilitating the erosion of the physical and moral fabric of America to subsidize the Plutocrats and Kleptocrats, who impoverish communities when they come waltzing in with their unregistered private equity advisors.