| User Blox 4 |
|
- Put stuff here
|
Barack Obama  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
|
|
Fri Mar 26, 2010 at 07:43:18 AM MST
|
| So. The health care legislation is essentially done. Whew. Honestly, it was getting old, wasn't it? I mean, I was writing posts about it last summer. I'm glad to have self-appointed license to think of something else. Like climate change.
In today's New York Times:
Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it "cap and tax," and Tea Partyfollowers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington.
Mr. Obama dropped all mention of cap and trade from his current budget. And the sponsors of a Senate climate bill likely to be introduced in April, now that Congress is moving past health care, dare not speak its name.
"I don't know what 'cap and trade' means," Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said last fall in introducing his original climate change plan.
Say, what? |
| Jay Stevens :: The death of Cap and Trade |
| Just like the public option was the compromise position between industry subsidy and single-payer health care, so, too was cap-and-trade the compromise between a carbon tax and, well, doing nothing. Cap-and-trade: the market solution to carbon emissions, where pollution permits are auctioned off to industries, who then can buy and sell the permits on the open market. It gives incentives to companies to reduce pollution by offering an opportunity to make a profit from selling permits as their pollution decreases. And cap-and-trade has a successful past; it was used in the 1980s to curb sulfur dioxide emissions. It works.
But, as the NYT article outlines, cap-and-trade legislation has been riddled with loopholes and corporate subsidies, too often for the very industries that pollute the most. Congress critturs turned the legislation into (surprise!) crap. And the usual right-wing propaganda machine had the usual effect on fearful Democrats:
"We turned it into 'cap and tax,' and we turned that into an epithet," said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization supported by conservative individuals and corporations. "We also did a good job of showing that a bunch of big companies - Goldman Sachs, the oil companies, the big utilities - would get windfall profits because they'd been given free ration coupons."
(By the way, you folks that opposed cap-and-trade out of fear that it was mechanism for Wall Street to prosper, congratulations. You got punked.)
So what now?
That plan, still being written, will include a cap on greenhouse gas emissions only for utilities, at least at first, with other industries phased in perhaps years later. It is also said to include a modest tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel, accompanied by new incentives for oil and gas drilling, nuclear power plant construction, carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Er, this looks a helluva like nothing.
Which reminds me of the best argument against global warming (brought to you by Peter Gleick):
Oh, right. There isn't one.
There is no good argument against global warming. In all the brouhaha about tiny errors recently found in the massive IPCC report, the posturing by global climate deniers, including some elected officials, leaked emails, and media reports, here is one fact that seems to have been overlooked:
Those who deny that humans are causing unprecedented climate change have never, ever produced an alternative scientific argument that comes close to explaining the evidence we see around the world that the climate is changing.
But then it snowed this year, so what does Gleick know?
I'm constantly amazed by how our congressional representatives fear public backlash from making good policy. It's been said before elsewhere often enough, but it bears repeating: the Republican party and its conservative base will raise a stink no matter what you do. Health care subsidies and increase market competition for health insurance is a Heritage Foundation and Republican party invention, but the GOP and Tea Baggers are still treating it as End Times. They do not have an ideology beyond winning the next election. It's that simple. |
|
| Poll |
| Voting. Useful or not? |
|
|
|
Results
|
|
