Cap n Trade Not Necessay in US if EPA Gets Involved

Cap n trade would still be the prefered way of going, because it allows Obamicans to pick and chose winners, also exert greater control over the great unwashed.

However, if it doesn't fly, and it doesn't look like it will, they can still use the EPA.

The problem with hard quotas (command and control, the article calls it), rather than taxes or tradeable permits, is the cost of enforcement. You were complaining earlier about bureaucracy in environmental policy. Well, enforcing output levels requires an army of enforcement agents. Economic policies, like taxes or tradeable permits, create positive incentives for business to be cleaner and they need less policing because they affect the companies' cost curves. The only incentive created by hard quotas is the incentive to emit illegally, dump or cheat some way. There is no cheating with taxes and permits because the external cost is internalized into the companies' private cost curve. The profit-maximizing level of emissions is built into the economic policy.

Don't get me wrong I'm not in favor of any method. I'm a Moncktonian.

"The proper response to a non-problem is do nothing"

~Lord Christoper Monckton~

And, like I said before, I respect both sides of the debate. Maybe there's a climate change problem, maybe there is not. I'm not a scientist. Frankly I don't even care about the answer. In my opinion, we're likely fucking up the planet in all sorts of ways that we shouldn't be. Also, in my opinion, most corporations do not act in a socially-optimal manner. We ought to monitor their activity much more closely, including their use of the environment.

I'll trust the scientists to figure out if we have a problem in need of solving. But I'm an economist. My role is to comment on the soundness of EACH side's policy in its likely effectiveness in achieving their goals.

Mostly I take up the "Defeatist's position": I'll be dead long before the Earth will be fucked up enough to kill me. In 4B years or so the Sun will expand into a red giant and incinerate the Earth, so humanity is doomed anyway. We might as well suck this fucking planet dry and enjoy the ride now...there's no retirement to save for, in the long run.