Carbon tax? Cap and trade? Climate change economics can be exhausting and complicated. But I just found a great article that breaks the whole thing down in a very understandable way. Yes, Mother Jones is a little biased as a publication, but the reporters are stellar communicators. And I love me some good reporting. The gist? I'm much more of an environmentalist than economist. Vote cap and trade.
FROM MOTHER JONES
March/April 2009
By Kevin Drum
Though it's not been mentioned much lately amid the sea of bailout headlines, the global economy isn't the only thing melting down right now. So are the polar ice caps. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has warned, we are nearing—if we haven't already passed—the tipping point at which the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere becomes so high that feedback loops will cause it to keep increasing on its own even if humans never emit another CO2 molecule again. To keep the planet habitable, he says, we must cut emissions not 10, not 20, but a full 80 percent by 2050; anything short of that will lead to "global cataclysm."
Fine then. We need to fix the climate, and we need to start yesterday. President Obama plainly understands this. His environmental rhetoric has focused mainly on things like wind farms and green jobs, but the backbone of his climate policy is actually an ambitious program that, if done right, will reduce greenhouse gases and raise desperately needed revenue—and, most important of all, has a fighting chance of making it through the congressional sausage factory in one piece. If he sticks to his guns, the idea will be a household term before the year is out. It's called cap and trade, and it springs from a simple yet surprisingly hard-to-answer question: What's the best, and fastest, way to reduce pollution?
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