1. Manufacturing is the backbone of national prosperity and national security. Our country's standard of living, ability to make good on its Social Security commitments to retirees, and military power rely on manufacturing. Anything that undermines the United States' manufacturing base must therefore be regarded as a clear and present danger to our national security, as well as to our standard of living.
2. Intelligent management (lean manufacturing, Toyota production system) can reduce per-unit labor costs to the point where access to cheap labor should not be a consideration in deciding where to build a factory. The best engineering on earth cannot abolish laws of thermodynamics that define the minimum amount of energy that is required to make steel, aluminum, and most chemical products.
3. Factories, power plants, and vehicles have an ethical and often legal duty to control emissions that are harmful to human, animal, and plant life. Carbon dioxide does not qualify as such an emission, so its regulation has no identifiable employee safety or public health benefits.
4. Although carbon dioxide emissions may play a role in trapping or absorbing sunlight:
• The preponderance of global warming is almost certainly due to unavoidable climate cycles. These include both Ice Ages (New York's Finger Lakes were created by glaciers) and warm periods that encouraged Viking settlements in Greenland.
• Regulation of carbon dioxide emissions by the United States will do nothing to reduce atmospheric concentrations of this gas as long as countries like China have no plans or obligations to implement similar regulations. It will, by raising energy costs, encourage manufacturers to move their smokestacks, and all the carbon dioxide and manufacturing jobs that go with them, to China.
• The Company further notes that South American countries that are among the Kyoto Treaty's most vocal advocates are burning down rain forests (carbon sinks) to clear land for development.
5. Real wealth comes from exactly three activities: mining, agriculture, and manufacturing. It does not come from trading carbon offset credits, coins, comic books, stamps, baseball cards, and other collectibles.
• Carbon offset trading also creates widespread opportunities for frauds and scams at the expense of credulous consumers and even businesses. It has, in fact, been compared to the medieval scam of selling indulgences for people's sins.
6. Proposed carbon cap-and-trade mandates would reward their corporate advocates for implementing existing business plans, "not raising hogs," or forcing consumers and businesses to buy their products or services.
   
• A proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs seems to benefit only companies that manufacture fluorescent lights that, in our experience, are far less friendly to the human eye than incandescent bulbs.
  
• The Company's position is that these corporations should earn money the old-fashioned way: by getting the cost of their "green" products down to where an engineering economic analysis yields a positive Net Present Value for purchasing them. For reference,
  

where P is the original cash outlay at time 0, Ak is the net benefit (savings or income minus costs) in the kth time period, and i is the buyer's required rate of return on investments. (Salvage value, which is generally negligible, is ignored.) The Company encourages sellers of so-called "green" products to get P low enough, and/or A high enough, so people and businesses will buy them voluntarily.

7. The Company supports and encourages efficiency improvements and resource recycling that, while their primary purpose and effect is to reduce operating costs, have the incidental effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product or service.

1. In Aesop's fable of the mice who voted to put a bell on the cat so they would know it was coming, all the mice thought it was a wonderful idea until the quesiton came up as to who was to put the bell on the cat.
2. To prove the limitations of what kings and governments can do, King Canute sat by the seashore and ordered the tide not to come in. Needless to say, he was soon soaked by the incoming tide. Greenhouse gas regulations are likely to be about as effective, noting that most global warming is probably due to solar warming (that is also affecting Mars).
• Persia's King Xerxes order that heavy seas receive three hundred lashes for destroying his bridge across the Bosporus was equally unrelated to the waters' eventually becoming calm.
  

1. Excessive carbon emissions per unit of product are symptomatic of underlying waste (muda) in its production. This is why use of carbon emissions as a performance indicator can indeed reduce supply chain costs.
   
2. The same kinds of waste can, however, exist in carbon-neutral systems. We therefore prefer to focus on energy streams as opposed to carbon. If we take care of the energy streams, the carbon (if present) will take care of itself.