Is Cap and Trade the best way to go? Clearly, no

BY Jay Nerger

Al Gore certainly thinks Cap and Trade’s the way to go. But then again, he does have a Nobel Prize, so he must be an authority on all matters pertaining to the global warming phenomenon.

It seems like the best fix must be to create a large, unwieldy bureaucratic method to solve the problem of carbon in our atmosphere. This is why President Obama created the Carbon Cap and Trade System, where the government can auction off permits to electrical companies so they can continue to pollute the atmosphere. In this case, the environment stays polluted, but the U.S. government can make money off it. 

Unfortunately, only 15 percent of the permits are being auctioned; the rest are simply being given away. A little money is better than none, right?

It would be better and far easier to manage if the government could just ignore all of the lobbyists and ignorant voters. It’s the lobbyists’ fault that the permits are being given away, because congressmen from those states that produce a lot of coal or steel wouldn’t vote for it anyway.

Under the 932-page bill (H.R. 2454) created by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, oil companies get only 2 percent of the permits, while electricity companies and raw material processors will get the bulk of the permits. Coincidentally, electrical companies and raw material processors pollute the most. 

The bill does not need to be this long; most of it is a ton of handouts for congressmen trying to please their constituents so they’ll get reelected. According to the Center for Public Integrity, approximately 2,340 different lobbyists worked on the Waxman-Markey bill, some placing provisions for portable spas and technical standards for hot-food-holders within the body of the bill.

Representative Rick Boucher, D-Virginia, craftily placed a provision in the bill for billions of dollars for the coal industry. It seems counterproductive for an energy bill to contain billions of dollars for the coal industry. Plus all of these handouts are costing taxpayers more because they are paying for it. Essentially, handouts are a way for politicians to get other people to pay for their select constituents.

As expected, the bill is also under fire from Republicans who decry the excessive handouts and the overall structure of the bill. As it stands now, Republicans can only slow down the bill’s progression through Congress because the Democrats have the majority.

One card that they can play is to force the Democrats to read the entire 932-page bill aloud, but that has been minimized through the use of a speed reader, Douglas Wilder.
Representative Joe Barton, R-Texas, proposed one of 450 amendments threatened by the Republicans in response to this Democratic bill. Eventually, that number was cut down to only 10 or 11. Barton is a ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, so his voice carries some weight over the proceedings.

His substitute for the bill is a renewable, clean energy standard that does not bring in much revenue, but it won’t have the same effects on the economy. This may not be the best solution, but it is certainly much better than the whole H.R. 2454 excess. 

A far simpler solution than even the Republicans’ plan would be to enact a “carbon tax” in which polluters pay an amount per ton of carbon emitted. It is efficient, much easier to regulate, and the bill will not be 932 pages long. The total revenue of just the electrical industry was $400 billion in 2007 and the carbon output of the country was about 7 billion metric tons. If each metric ton was taxed at $10 per metric ton, then the government could receive up to $70 billion a year. That means that we could afford to pay off some of our national debt.

It is strange because the carbon tax was the least considered plan simply because it had the word “tax” in it, and Congress was afraid that ignorant voters would interpret that as a bad thing. If people would get it in their heads that taxes are not necessarily bad, then a much more efficient solution to the problem of carbon can be found.

If we go by the mantra of Occam’s Razor, then, “When confronted by two theories with the same goal, the simpler one is better.” Or expressed in Latin as the “lex parsimoniae: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” roughly translated as “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

Nerger is a member
of the class of 2011.