My conclusions: at least a Rethug is upfront about their idiot policies; BlueDogs are generally the camel’s nose making its way into the tend, and the Rethugs count on the BlueDogs to provide political coverage and obfuscation. Thus do both parties bend to the will of corporations.

The two factors that I’ve seen make a difference:
1. Education — hard to do, but pays huge dividends.
2. Cost structures that have simple, clear requirements and force corporate entities to pay more of the costs of their activities. We have to get a handle on ‘externalities’, which of course means being politically aware and active. Sigh….

FYI anderson cooper on CNN talking with Gergen and Zakaria about climate.

I don’t think that such credits would truly undermine the system. They might pick at the edges. Procedures in place can vet these project based credits for BS.

Any of the land use and forestry based credits have a real issue of credibility. ie what happens when things change in 10 years and someone decides that they want to cut down your tree farm carbon sequestration project. Whole lot of work has gone into that at the international level.

I confess I don’t understand the Kyoto mechanisms well enough to hazard an answer to your thoughtful question. If you could say more about the complexitie -or even hazard an answer yourself – I’d appreciate the chance to learn. Thanks!

With carbon cap & trade, I’m very concerned that bogus carbon credits will undermine the whole system. (sea shepherd has their eye one bogosity; the “tree-planting” credits [depending on bioregion] may well be yet another. Did bogus credits surface with SO2, or did SO2 simply allocate the universe of credits among all sources and contract from thre, effectively shuuting the door for bogus offsets?

And – yep – the Mining Act did it for me, too.

CBO speaks about economic efficiency. True that carbon tax would be more economically efficient. If one were ever to be put in place, especially one that was to fall at the right level in the supply chain. Gore tried pushing the carbon tax. Not so successful.

You look at the results from the cap and trade program for SO2? Phenomenal success. You’ve also noted that each of the candidates advocate an auction. This is probably a pretty obscure point for most people, but auction rather than grant of credits says a lot about who really takes the hit for the cost of control.

Yes, to set the best cap, you need to know as much as you can about the “optimal” level of pollution to allow (your “cap”). Carbon tax allows you to say “I don’t know but I’m willing to add this amount of cost to the system”. What the actual amount emitted under the tax is thus an unknown outcome of how the economy responds.

This is important for how the US would interact with the Kyoto protocol (or its successor) because each country gets assigned an emission level. How would you propose to incorporate the uncertain result of a carbon tax into signing onto the Kyoto Protocol.

In any case, good post. Thing that most concerns me is the Mining Act.