The Wall Street Journal reports:
In the 1960s, a University of Wisconsin graduate student named Thomas Crocker came up with a novel solution for environmental problems: cap emissions of pollutants and then let firms trade permits that allow them to pollute within those limits.
Now legislation using cap-and-trade to limit greenhouse gases is working its way through Congress and could become the law of the land. But Mr. Crocker and other pioneers of the concept are doubtful about its chances of success. They aren’t abandoning efforts to curb emissions. But they are tiptoeing away from an idea they devised decades ago, doubting it can work on the grand scale now envisioned.
“I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,” says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo. He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem.
The House has passed cap-and-trade legislation. The Senate could take up a measure in September. But Republicans strongly oppose the idea — arguing that it is a tax that will hurt the economy — and Democrats are struggling to come up with an approach that apportions the inevitable cost of a cap-and-trade system among different interests, from consumers to utilities to coal plants.
Mr. Crocker, who went on to become a professor at the University of Wyoming, is one of two economists who dreamed up cap-and-trade in the 1960s. The other, John Dales, who died in 2007, was also a skeptic of using the idea to tame global warning.
And if Thomas Crocker doesn’t believe cap and trade is a good way to regulate carbon, why in hell does Congress, and the Obama administration, want to take us down that road.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Let’s start calling it what it is: ‘Pricing carbon’ = taxing carbon
- WSJ video on plummeting prospects for cap and trade: ‘This is going to be blow to Mr. Gore financially…this is very bad news for his portfolio if cap and trade fails’
- Al Gore’s prediction: Senate will pass cap and trade ‘before Copenhagen’. Intrade: Cap and trade prediction market is trading at only $9 after peaking at $35 during summer
- Wall Street Journal: Delay of cap and trade bill ‘a major victory for the U.S. economy, at least for now’
- Trailer for new anti-cap and trade documentary: Climate Chains
If the creator doesn’t even support the current cap and trade legislation, why should we? Let your opinions be heard at http://dontcapandtradeourjobs.net/?soc=tmtwt.
[...] Some people are just so negative you want to spit. Like the guys railing on about the ineffectiveness of cap and trade; you’d think they invented it or something. Oh, wait, they did?. [...]