BuckeyeBlog

On the face of it, cap and trade sounds like a great idea. Instead of command and control pollution control, the historic structure of state and federal environmental agencies, cap and trade gets the government out of the business of regulating every jot and tittle in the name of restricting pollutants. Instead, under cap and trade, you can pollute as much as you can pay for. While that seems jarring at first, it’s the right thing to do. Instead of making me wait for a year or five years and then allowing me to emit, say, a million tons of an air pollutant, why not just let me emit the million tons any way I choose? I’ll be sure to do it as cheaply as I can, and the same environmental goals will be met.

So liberals have jumped on cap and trade for global warming. They want to limit some greenhouse gas emissions.

Only problem is, you have to define the property right before you can cap and trade.

Imagine putting a cap and trade restriction on the right to travel. Can’t leave your house unless you buy a travel permit, and we’re only going to allow so many miles of travel per day.

Actually, that’s pretty much what they want to do with cap and trade. Al Gore can fly five times a day in his private jets, but you, you little citizen you, have to calculate the carbon footprint of your 1998 Hyundai Accent .

Conservatives don’t like this idea. Neither does George Voinovich .

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.