If there's one lesson from the health care debacle, it is that Waxman-Markey was and is a dead end. Many of us objected to the bill on the grounds that it supports a lot of phony offsets for twenty years, imposes lots of costs and regulation in the meantime, and then never really does much to help climate change, given the difficulties of political precommitment. I believe that people with these objections, such as myself, were viewed as "obstructionists" by many or as people who were simply looking for an excuse not to support the bill. But the idea that Congress was just playing around, and had no real will to address the problem, should now be much, much more credible. For all the talk about Waxman-Markey as a "framework," I see plenty of reasons -- all the more now -- to think Congress never meant to follow through.
The advantage of a carbon tax is that it forces Congress (and others) to demonstrate a certain amount of seriousness up front. A good rule of thumb for a climate change bill is whether a representative voting for it can and will say: "This will raise the price of gasoline in the next six months and that's the whole point."
via www.marginalrevolution.com
I don't see the advantage. Cap-and-trade will raise the price of energy too. People in congress are free to say that as much as they'd like. So, cap-and-trade may only be a dead end if politicians choose to be dishonest about it. (emoticon alert) ;->
It is my feeling that it is the role of economists to argue that cap-and-trade will lead to higher energy prices ("and that's the whole point"). To claim that politicians are dishonest about it and therefore cap-and-trade won't work IS obstructionist (from an economist) because it is mixing the politics with the economics. I think.
