Wednesday, 04 March 2009

• Market solutions to climate change: debate between a carbon tax v carbon caps

  http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/the_debate_zone/carbon-tax-vs-cap-and-trade
  
  

  The Debate Zone: Carbon Tax V. Cap and Trade

  • Why we need a carbon tax
    By Gregg Easterbrook
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    It’s simple. It’s easy to enforce. And it provides the right incentives to polluters as well as inventors and engineers working to develop cleaner technologies.

  '[ . . . ] The simplest, most efficacious, least bureaucratic, and best-for-the-nation initial move against greenhouse gas buildup would be a carbon tax. [ . . . ]
  

  • Such a system would be far less complex than any cap-and-trade scheme. The McCain-Lieberman greenhouse gas cap-and-trade proposal, which drew 43 votes in the Senate in 2005, was 491 sections long. And that was just the authorizing legislation, not the tens of thousands of pages of administrative orders required to put the bill into force! The Obama plan is likely to be equally complex by the time it wends its way through Congress.
  • Because carbon cap-and-trade systems are inherently super-complex, they are nearly certain to be “gamed"—defeated by gimmicks, litigation, and special-favors lobbying. Lawyers will always think of pretexts faster than regulators can repair flaws in the language of complex regulation. America’s approach to environmental regulation is already too steeped in litigation. A carbon cap-and-trade system would make this problem worse. [ . . . ]'
    

  • Carbon caps are better
    By Carter F. Bales and Rick Duke
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    A cap and trade policy gives business greater certainty about future costs. It also puts a limit on emissions and is more likely to result in a real reduction in greenhouse gases.

  '[A] cap on carbon provides more fundamental environmental certainty than a tax, because it is, by definition, a fixed limit on emissions'

  
  

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