According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 24% of voters know that cap and trade has something to do with the environment.
By Tommaso Boggia
May 18, 2009
As someone working day and night on empowering young people to organize around climate policy, this isn’t much of a surprise. Cap and Trade is an extremely ineffective term that has no emotional connection to the looming threat of the climate crisis and to the incredible opportunities that will come from solving it. It also refers to one of the most complicated set of policies in our democracy which makes it really hard to come up with an effective name. Even climate bloggers shy away from using the term, preferring things like: “clean energy jobs policy” and “closing the carbon loopholes”.
I have tried explaining this complicated policy countless times, usually with the result of causing shut-eye to anyone listening. Luckily, there are people out there that found much better and simpler ways to explain it:
In order to clarify the upcoming international climate treaty in Copenhagen, Alex and I have decided to use the metaphor of the place we know best, the world of Whitman College.
Whitman has a problem: there are too many parties being thrown and they are producing too many red keg cups. Whitman needs a certain number of keg cups in order to be a properly functioning college but the level of cups has gone beyond the number that Whitman can possibly process.
Hopefully the videos and the article above gave you a good understanding of the main concepts of Cap and Trade. The government sets a limit to pollution, assigns permits to polluters and gradually gets rid of permits as time goes by. Polluting industries that don’t clean up their act and are found without permits get punished while those willing to innovate become more attractive to investors. As simple as it sounds, this system is extremely vulnerable to loophole guns (i.e. industry friendly democrat legislators) that turn this potentially planet-saving plan into yet another corporate bailout. Because of the high likelyhood that polluting industries will game the system, many groups are taking a strong stance against the Cap and Trade approach proposing a Carbon Tax instead. Unfortunately Carbon Taxes have a whole set of regulatory issues as well.
Any solution to the climate crisis won’t be simple. Just like Cap and Trade, a Carbon Tax is also vulnerable to the loophole guns. Unfortunately it seems like, once again, the environmental movement will be divided and ineffective in making our case for a cleaner, more prosperous world.
It doesn’t seem like those 46% of American voters will get any closer to understanding Cap and Trade anytime soon.
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