Cap-and-Trade Transformed by Debased DC Discourse

Ever since the turn of the millennium, we’ve argued that the most fundamental problem facing most of the world, but especially in the US, was the low level of public discourse.

Ever since the turn of the millennium, we’ve argued that the most fundamental problem facing most of the world, but especially in the US, was the low level of public discourse.

Ever since the turn of the millennium, we’ve argued that the most fundamental problem facing most of the world, but especially in the US, was the low level of public discourse.

The latest example of this sad phenomenon, of course, is not just the Tea Party itself, but the way it has so quickly become a force to be reckoned with inside the Washington DC Beltway. [br]

Unfortunately, there are also numerous LESS obvious examples of how debased American public discourse has become,

and what happened to the environmentally middle of the road “cap and trade” approach to limiting emissions and dealing with global warming is yet another example of the insidious way debased public discourse in the US affects the fate of “behind the headlines” policy decisions.

From The New York Times, March 26, 2010:

Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.

Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it.

President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.

Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington….

Cap and trade was first tried on a significant scale 20 years ago under the first Bush administration as a way to address the problem of airborne sulfur dioxide pollution — widely known as acid rain — from coal-burning power plants in the Eastern United States.

A limit was imposed on emissions from the plants, and utilities were allowed to buy and sell permits to comply.

Today it is considered one of the most effective environmental initiatives. …

[So] why did cap and trade die?

The short answer is that it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.

The idea began as a middle-of-the-road Republican plan to unleash the market to reduce power plant pollution and spur innovation.

But when lawmakers tried to apply the concept to the far more pervasive problem of carbon dioxide emissions,

it ran into gale-force opposition from the oil industry, conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax, and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.

“Economywide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has been promoting the idea for more than two decades.

“The term itself became too polarizing and too paralyzing in the effort to win over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to try to do something about climate change and our oil dependency.”

 

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Pathetic and yet all too predictable – while confirming, once again, our basic thesis from even before 2001 that the MAIN problem confronting the US and other countries is the generally low level of public discourse.

And it really is the mission of Economy Watch – and, we hope, our ever-growing band of regular readers – to do SOMETHING to raise the terribly debased level of public discourse that is so destructive to ANY sort of positive movement just about everywhere in the world.