re: #63 DaddyG

I did not say that. There are many proposals to combat it that aren’t so politically charged as creating a new market with a liscense to pollute. Some very capitalist and conservative folks I know are all for biofuels from brown sources (food oils) and non food crops. Conservation through better transportation and construction is also a very attractive idea to captalists. In that sense the market will support a greener lifestyle.

They won’t support it as long as polluting is cheaper. I’m not lambasting them over that; corporate executives are by required law to serve only the interests of their shareholder’s profits over the current quarter. The only way to make any change happen is to add a cost to doing it the wrong way, and deduct from the cost of doing it the right way.

Cap-and-trade was already a compromise position from a direct carbon tax. This reminds me a lot of the health care debate when the left started “compromising” before negotiation had even started, then the right started attacking the compromise position, etc. So if you don’t like cap-and-trade, let’s go back to direct carbon taxes with no trading. I’d be comfortable with that.

The notion of an energy credit exchange market strikes me as completely arbitrarily priced, based on where the cap is and what the tax is for exceeding it, which would then vary between industries, etc.