As an advocate of doing something sensible about global warming, and taking it seriously, I oppose this bill. Cap and trade is an open invitation to massive corruption.

Who gets an initial allowance? On what terms are trades conducted? Does one man’s promise to plant a forest in the Sahara count as an offset, while another’s is indignantly rejected for the transparent fraud that it is?

If we are to do something about rising CO2 levels, we might start by developing the technology to substitute solar for coal. In the meantime, we could seize such straws as are available: build more wind power, emphasize efficiency in the use of energy, make our buildings so they capture the sun in winter and reflect it in summer, etc.

If desperate measures are called for, we might do them honestly and just enact a carbon tax. Burning any fossil fuel would cost, in direct proportion to the carbon content of that fuel. Importing anything made abroad would cost, in direct proportion to the carbon content implicit in the thing made.

(Failure to include this second provision would just outsource all energy-intensive industry, forcing it offshore to where things are less efficient, energywise, but more efficient, economically, because they escape taxation.)

But then we get into the weeds—-what about things made with hydropower? But what about things made with hydropower, or so they say, when every other part of the exporting nation’s economy runs on coal? Energy is fungible. Who can say what fraction of the electricity used to make this or that ton of steel came from hydro?

The current bill has not even attempted to think through these complexities, which are multiplied in a cap and trade regime. What is to prevent the construction of factories right on the Canadian border, drawing their electricity from Quebec Hydro, while Quebec supplies its own industry from newly built coal-fired plants? The electricity would technically be “clean”, so there would be no carbon emissions. Riiiiggghhhtt.

What is to prevent an outsourcing of almost every energy-intensive activity to Brazil, China, etc.? These economies are not as efficient as our own, and world CO2 emissions will soar as a result of the perverse incentives built into our cap-and-trade law, but we will be able to preen. WE don’t emit as much CO2 as we used to.