During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama made it clear that taxing the rich required the rich to pay not just more money than the poor, but to pay at a higher rate, too. When Charlie Gibson, of all people, pointed out that a lower capital gains rate actually brought in more government revenue than a higher one, Barack was having none of it.

“I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness,” Obama said. “[T]hose who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.”

So, to sum up, even if a lower tax rate generates more money, “fairness” trumps all. In practical terms, this means soaking the rich was more important than funding programs that help the poor.

Given that position, it’s stunning that he is now bypassing Congress to unilaterally implement the most regressive tax in the history of the country, and left-wingers, by and large, are cheering him on. “[This regressive tax] re-establishes the moral authority on the part of the United State of America in leading the world community,” bloviated former veep and current hypocrite Al Gore. His sentiments are echoed by lefties throughout the blogosphere, and none of them seem to notice that what they’re applauding is a $50 billion-per-year tax that will be borne largely by the poorest of the poor.

Of course, that’s not what they’re calling it. No, this tax is disguised as new EPA regulations on coal-fired power plants designed to combat global warming.

Oh, here we go. Now your eyes have rolled up into the back of your head. “I really don’t understand your obsession with climate change denial, Jim,” a friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook. “I find your position on this subject very strange and counterproductive.”

Well, fine. Strange and counterproductive is the story of my life. And, yes, I often feel like the guy in the loony bin who screams at the walls and thinks everyone else is crazy except him. But it’s just staggering to me that people who would never accept an annual $50 billion regressive tax on the poorest of the poor when it is framed as such will applaud the same thing when it’s wrapped up in a pretty “Stop Global Warming” label.

I didn’t lead off here by mentioning global warming because that always veers the discussion away from the point I’m trying to make. This is not an article about “climate change denial.” This is an article about how global warming alarmists are oblivious to how their actions are exacerbating poverty and death right now, not in some distant polar-ice-capless future.

It’s very simple. The president is unilaterally forcing coal plants to cut their emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by the year 2030. A study conducted by the United States Chamber of Commerce has determined that this will cost the economy $50 billion per year. That’s a whopping $500 billion over ten years, and by the time we reach 2030 and hit those emissions targets, the cost will be close to a trillion bucks.

Who’s paying that trillion bucks? Only people who use electricity. Or, in other words, everybody. And the rate of payment isn’t even remotely progressive.  99% of this expense will be shouldered by the 99%. This is as regressive a tax on the poor as anything that has ever been done in the history of the nation. Bill Gates and the 1% can afford a 15-20% increase in their heating bills. The 85-year-old widow whose only source of income is her Social Security checks cannot. It’s the poor who are getting soaked.

And for what?

Well, if you pay attention to Al Gore, we’re getting our moral authority back, so, you know, there’s that. But $50 billion a year is a steep subscription rate for moral authority, and I don’t see how that’s worth further impoverishing 85-year-old shut-ins. If we’re going to grind the faces of the poor into the dirt, shouldn’t our climate change tax actually have a positive impact on the climate?

Because it won’t. And before you start waving the “Denier!” flags around, my source on this isn’t Fox News or Glenn Beck. It’s the Obama administration. It’s the United Nations. Using the numbers and projections that form the backbone of the oft-touted consensus, we discover that shutting down all coal-fired plants in America would reduce the projected rate of global temperature increase by…

(Drum roll please…)

… a whopping .05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100! 

That’s it.  Now reduce those temperature savings by 70% to account for the fact that we’re not shutting down all the plants but only reducing the emissions by 30%. Suddenly, you’ve managed to slow the earth’s temperature increase by only .015 F. But you have to reduce those savings by another 70% to account for the difference between 2100 and the 2030 target date.

That means that Obama is asking poor families to choose between heating their homes and putting food on their tables to achieve a projected reduction in the temperature increase of .0045 degrees Fahrenheit. $50 billion collected from the poor to prevent warming of less than 5 thousandths of a degree.

That’s not just science – it’s math.

So, please, spare me the pointless discussions about the 97% and the whole “denier” nonsense. Because even if Al Gore’s worst case scenario of boiling oceans happens to come true, this onerous new tax, which one Democratic senator has admitted will mean that a “lot of people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum are going to die,” will do nothing to prevent climate armageddon. No, I stand corrected – it will lessen the impact of that meltdown by .0045 degrees.

You want unfair, Mr. Obama? That’s unfair.

So if you still find this obsession with the biggest assault on the poor I’ve seen in my lifetime “strange and counterproductive,” then I don’t know what I have to do to convince you that this is a big deal.

Maybe I’ll just scream at the loony bin walls for awhile longer.