The latest issue of TIME takes a closer look at cap-and-trade proposals for carbon dioxide emissions. Unfortunately, the magazine avoids addressing a key question: would cap-and-trade programs help the climate?
The article ?The First Big Test? focuses on the fact that each of the three remaining presidential contenders has stated support for a cap-and-trade program.
Author Eric Pooley could have examined the likelihood that cap-and-trade programs would do anything to limit global warming. He could have investigated why cap-and-trade earns support from some unlikely suspects.
Instead, he implies that cap-and-trade proposals already have support from everyone except the evil coal industry and its congressional lackeys.
How can cap-and-trade supporters win enough support to put the scheme in place?
[T]he bill’s supporters must make the case that cap and trade’s costs are dwarfed by its benefits ? not just averting a climate catastrophe but also jump-starting clean-energy industries and creating millions of new “green collar” jobs.
Yes, Mr. Pooley accepts without question that a cap-and-trade program would avert a ?climate catastrophe.? He also accepts without question the notion that government should ?jump-start? clean-energy industries and divert resources away from their most efficient uses to create new ?green collar? jobs.
Perhaps he should have listened to Beacon Hill Institute economist David Tuerck?s take on similar notions espoused by the Appalachian State University Energy Center.
