Re: Cap and Trade

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008 17:40:32 -0800, "Ernie Jurick"
<invalidexample@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Dave Head" <rally2xs@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8njjj4h23791rf2md7ok08s46bpb4phr1b@xxxxxxxxxx
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...

Your envirophobia is showing again. :-)

If I didn't believe that a large part of the "environmental movement" to be
just a cover for anti-industrialists and obstructionists in general, I could
get closer to considering something like that. But I do. They're mostly out
to hurt _American_ industry, and have been, since the 70's. They, that is
leftists in general and environmentalists in particular, got all full of
themselves with their power around that time, the end of the Viet Nam War and
the resignation of Richard Nixon as some of the major events that made them
feel omnipotent, and they've been trying to carry along that illusion ever
since.

They are enemies of the country, and enemies of prosperity. "Global warming"
is just more of the same nonsense. These are the friutcakes that want to
deprive us of our cars and force us into slow, smelly buses and trains to get
places, and generally make life a PITA.

The EU instituted a cap-and-trade
program years ago. It has its problems, of course, and lots of them, like
any new regulatory process, but the EU is in much better fiscal shape than
the USA at the moment, Kyoto or no Kyoto.

Maybe they can get away with it in the EU, but I know I could rely on the bunch
around here to make it an edged weapon, with which to behead (American)
industry.

Plus, we can learn from the EU's mistakes.
http://www.feasta-multimedia.org/2007_energy/emissions2007.pdf

The BEST way to control CO2 emissions is with a carbon tax, but Americans
have been taught that all tax increases are bad,

They are. If you don't oppose absolutely every one, you end up with a
situation like we saw in the '70's, when I think it was music group Abba that
left their own country due to the confiscatory tax system, or at least talked
of doing it.

so that's the route of last
resort.

Hopefully, it won't happen either.

The whole program could be funded by simply doubling our minuscule
federal gasoline tax, the lowest in the developed world.
-- Ernie

Not a good time to go that route. This is the eve of the electric car. If
things go right, there will be damn little money coming in from the gas tax in
a few years... <G>
.

Relevant Pages

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    (misc.news.internet.discuss)
  • Re: Cap and Trade
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    (misc.news.internet.discuss)
  • Re: Cap and Trade
    ... cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions. ... getting that through Congress, though, so how about just ordering the ... The BEST way to control CO2 emissions is with a carbon tax, ...
    (misc.news.internet.discuss)