If enacted, cap and trade proposals to reduce carbon emissions will be, at best, difficult to regulate and enforce, and slow to take effect. At worst they are decent ideas that have been cynically co-opted and cleverly filled with loopholes and boondoggles by lobbyists to benefit their high-polluting clients and the financial giants behind them.
Even if cap and trade were legislated perfectly and followed honestly, it's a complicated a way to reduce demand for fossil fuels quickly. A simpler, better way would be the "fee and dividend" alternative explained by James Hansen in the New York Times. Hansen is head of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a controversial figure. As a climate scientist he first raised the alarm about global warming more than 20 years ago; as an activist he has been outspoken in his opposition to the vested industrial, financial, and political interests resisting calls for climate-change mitigation. He has been arrested for his efforts to disrupt coal mining, and has to some extent alienated himself from entrenched interests across the board -- both political parties, some environmental organizations who don't like a bull in their china shops, and of course the fossil-fuel industries and their backers.
But if we can't decide between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax, which even Lindsey Graham thinks is the solution, here's an idea -- let's do both.
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