Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Look, there’s a faint echo of all this on the left — people who are outraged at the idea that we’re going to make saving the planet basically a business decision, aligning private incentives with environmental goals so that doing the right thing becomes a profit opportunity rather than a moral duty. That, I think, is what’s behind the furor over cap and trade.

Krugman

This reminds me of the "debates" over the placement of the Star Wars missiles. They're completely worthless as a defensive weapon. Even in tests rigged to let them perform well, they're useless. They are good, however, for shooting down passenger jets and satellites and this makes their installation a constant, mindlessly bellicose provocation. But the mind reading conservatives who support Star Wars know the causes of the objections to them far better than their critics. They have broken the codes and read the minds of the critics. They understand that it's irrational hatred for security driving the criticism.

And so with the efforts to introduce a market solution to GHG emissions. The experience with it to date is consistent bad faith, relentless efforts at gaming the system, lack of political will to police it and an actual increase in emissions. It doesn't work. There are conceivable circumstances in which it could work, but there's next to no support at all for the political changes that would be necessary.

Mind-reading, code-breaking liberals know better than their critics, alas, and this knowledge persists in spite of the broad support for carbon taxes and rebates, public funding for transitions to cleaner energy and advocacy for systems of production that don't lurch from one exploitive catastrophe to another. Maybe we can hope for some buyer's remorse from them down the line. After their fatuous, servile and useless response to global warming has managed to elect another Republican president.