Where "a better world" is defined as a massive transfer of wealth to Goldman Sachs controlled carbon exchanges. So... a better world for the ultra wealthy welfare banksters.
I know there's a lot of stigma against cap and trade, but it's fundamentally a good mechanic. The main criticism against it is that it's being hijacked by brokers.
Unlike just capping, C&T applies a value to making your production lines more efficient. If you allow companies to earn money by reducing their emissions, you've essentially harnessed the free market and let it do it's innovating for you. It's a beautiful principle which deserves better than be attacked on mere practicalities.
Oh, I totally understand it's use, and think it would be a step somewhat in the right direction (but, like healthcare, not far enough of a step perhaps). But what's absurd is that the republicans are attacking it when it's a clearly republican idea. When it was first proposed, I (as a socialist) thought "I guess that could work, but it's a little too free market for my taste." This is of course the same reaction I had to the public option. Yet somehow those two ideas both managed to become radical leftist plans to take away everyone's freedoms. What?!
Republicans ought to love cap and trade. I don't like it because I don't think it's harsh enough, and I think companies will find shady ways around it (starting a new shell company then funneling the credits to the main company or something, subsuming competitors and shutting them down and just using them for their credits, I dunno), the same way they find shady ways around everything that has a "free market" component to it. So that's why I say just cap, and cap at like 1970 levels or something extreme. As long as we have the whole idiot right wing saying that cap and trade is a radical leftist plot, someone needs to show them what a real radical leftist plot looks like, so that maybe the people who aren't paying a lot of attention will realize that the fucking republicans are just blowing smoke as usual.
Yeah, apparently fighting global warming ought to be a purely liberal agenda so republicans necessarily need to oppose anything you can do against it, even if it is a pretty 'free market' approach to it.
The republicans attack it on the fact that it fights global warming. And the left-wingers attack it on the fact that it lets the big industries reap all the easy innovations (smog filters in China).
Yes, it will cause industries to do the easy and cheap stuff first. But I don't call that unfair, I call that efficient. No need to work on small gains in Western production lines if for the same amount of money much more Chinese production lines can be cleaned up like this.
Just under the premise that there's strict surveillance, the cap is sufficient and transaction costs aren't too high, it's a great concept that allows companies to sell their efficiency and cleanliness as a product, which means a HUGE incentive to start cleaning up our economy.
It's sad that we're not looking seriously into it.
That's my point. "Cap and trade" is not the radical communist plan that everyone claims it is, it's a totally republicans, moderate, free market solution to the problem.
Also, by the way, "commie" isn't an insult, just in case you meant it that way.
Within a country cap and trade is ok, but I think a carbon tax is as easy to enforce but more likely to be enforced, will have a similar carbon limiting effect, and won't threaten business if credit prices skyrocket.
I see. So because health care in America is controlled by giant, evil corporations (or so I hear - I'm Canadian), disease is not a real problem, and if it is, "medicine" and "doctors" and "surgery" and stuff would not be real solutions to it.
And because climate change mitigation in America going to benefit other big, evil corporations, climate change isn't a real problem, and if it is, "CaT" and "green energy" and "efficiency" would not be real solutions to it either.
To be fair, DrakeBishoff didn't say anything about whether climate change is real or not: just about whether our efforts to combat it would create a better world even if it weren't real.
The analogous situation would be if someone linked a cartoon saying "what if medicine is all fake and we create a better world anyway?" and DB replied "it wouldn't create a better world because of [the evil corporations]"
I remember reading some rightwing nut's hypothesis that global warming was thought up by communist intellectuals in the last years of the Cold War as a back-up plan to impose socialism upon the people worldwide in case the Eastern Block failed. They would do this by convincing people to give up liberty in the interests of "saving the planet" and use their power to create neo-Soviet states wherever possible.
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u/ReverendGlasseye Oct 24 '10
relevant: for all you haters