As an adjunct to the post immediately below, "Goldman Faces Carbon Market Curbs in Senate Proposals (GS; JPM)" which was sourced from Bloomberg, we have this from the Wall Street Journal via their Environmental Capital blog:
You know cap-and-trade faces headwinds when the people who invented the idea speak out against it.Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on the economists who first dreamed up a way to tackle pollution by using the market—capping pollutants and letting firms trade permits for pollution rights.
That work eventually led to emissions-trading programs such as acid rain, that have consistently been held up as an example for the current cap-and-trade plan to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. (Here’s a nice history of emissions-trading ideas.)
One of those economists, Thomas Crocker, doesn’t think cap-and-trade is the best way to tackle global warming—and not for all the economic reasons that push so many folks into the “carbon tax” camp. It’s a question of effectiveness. From the WSJ:
Mr. Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power.”>>>MORE
This one-two from competing news organizations is probably a good reason to keep them around. Let's hear it:
"Two, Four, Six, Eight...something, something...Fourth Estate"(The chant I proposed for picketing Dow Jones employees in '07. They didn't use it. Nor the one that ended "Basal Metabolic Rate". Go figure)
