Climate Reality Eludes the Business Press

[marmar]

from Dollars & Sense:



Climate Reality Eludes the Business Press
For the Wall Street Journal's editors, fear of a bigger
government outweighs the fear of a warmer planet.

By John Miller

Cap and Spend. As the Senate opens debate on its mammoth carbon regulation program this week, the phrase of the hour is "cap and trade." This sounds innocuous enough. But anyone who looks at the legislative details will quickly see that a better description is cap and spend. This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.

—Wall Street Journal editorial, June 2, 2008



Climate Reality Bites. Cap and trade is a tax imposed on business, disguising the true costs and thus making it more politically palatable. In reality, firms will merely pass on these costs to customers.

... politicians like cap and trade ... because it gives them a cut of the action and the ability to pick winners and losers. Some of the allowances would be given away, at least at the start, while the rest would be auctioned off, with the share of auctions increasing over time. This is a giant revenue grab.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that this meddling would cause a cumulative reduction in the growth of GDP by between 0.9% and 3.8% by 2030.

— Wall Street Journal editorial, May 27, 2008

The Wall Street Journal's editors are celebrating having dodged a big- government bullet when the cap-and-trade global warming bill sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, as amended by Barbara Boxer, went down to defeat this June in the Senate.

But the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 was a fairly low caliber munition in the fight against global warming. While undoubtedly the most comprehensive global warming bill ever to reach the Senate floor, its emission reductions fell well short of those called for by environmental groups or by the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

Inside Cap-and-Trade

"Cap-and-trade," introduced in the 1990 Clean Air Act to regulate sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions or acid rain, is now the favorite form of environmental regulation for politicians and big business. They find it far preferable to either command-and-control regulation, such as federal directives ordering electrical power plants to install smokestack scrubbers, or emissions taxes, such as a broad-based carbon tax.

Cap-and-trade, referred to variously as incentive-based regulation or market-based regulation, works this way. The federal government sets a mandatory, nationwide cap on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that it gradually reduces. At the same time the government requires companies, or any emitter, to hold allowances for their emissions. Typically each allowance entitles a company to emit one ton of CO2. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708miller.html

[GliderGuider]

1. Sidebar: Scientists Prove Water is Wet

The snark isn't the point, though.

Business is one of the primary guardian institutions that defend our growth paradigm against any attempt to dethrone it. That's why we call the path to perdition "Business as Usual". The other guardian institutions are: politics (of all stripes, capitalist or not); financial and economic institutions; educational institutions; and the media. They all work together to ensure that attempts to derail growth, whether by word or deed, are marginalized or destroyed wherever they appear.