Re: Cap and Trade

On Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:39:35 -0500, trudogg <independent@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

During the campaign, Barack Obama committed himself to supporting a
cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions. It'll be tough
getting that through Congress, though, so how about just ordering the
EPA to put together a program on its own under the aegis of the Clean
Air Act and skipping legislation entirely? David Roberts runs down the
pros and cons over at Gristmill, but I want to skip immediately down
to his last point:

Real disadvantage: public deliberation

One doesn't want to be sentimental, but there is something to the
argument that shift of this significance should be discussed in public
and shaped by the public's elected representatives. It would be nice,
in an ideal world, if reasoned debate and discussion and
interest-balancing yielded the perfect program.

But in this world, we're perilously late getting underway and
Obama must weigh America's procedural ideals against what a wise man
once called the "fierce urgency of now." Whatever it's other merits,
the Clean Air Act is now.

I think this is more than just sentimental. Cap-and-trade is a very,
very big program, and it just flatly shouldn't be implemented via
executive fiat. We liberals are already fuming over George Bush's
relatively minor last-minute executive orders, after all, and this
would be the granddaddy of all executive orders. It deserves public
debate, it deserves the permanence of congressional legislation, it
deserves to be a genuinely national program (not a kludgy jumble of
state initiatives, which is how it would have to work under CAA), and
it deserves the chance to get genuine public support in the process.
I've long thought that liberals tend to pay too little attention to
public opinion, and this is a serious mistake since big, longlasting
change never really happens without it. This is no exception. If we
really believe in carbon reduction via cap and trade, we need to
persuade the American public that it's a good idea. A cap-and-trade
bill should be the kind of landmark legislation that our kids talk
about, not a furtive agency rule slipped in quietly via the back door.

On a more practical note, I wonder if it would really be any faster
doing it via the CAA anyway. Thanks to Bush's stonewalling, the
rulemaking process for carbon regulation hasn't really even started
yet, and that process doesn't happen overnight. I wouldn't be
surprised if congressional legislation could actually happen faster
than an EPA initiative.

Kevin Drum

Well, if you're in a great huge hurry to bankrupt the entire country, instead
of just the big 3 and a few banks, you could institute cap-and-trade...
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Cap and Trade
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