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After targets, the big issue is cost. Where the Democrats want to make major emitters buy all their pollution permits at auction, McCain wants to give many of those permits away in the early years of the program. (So do Lieberman and Warner.) The idea is to reduce compliance costs for business, which is not a crazy idea for two reasons. First, the threat of huge new costs is one reason heavy industries don't support climate legislation. Second, those costs would inevitably be passed on to consumers. But despite generous use of free transitional permits, Lieberman-Warner hasn...
...many environmentalists as a compromise unequal to the scale of the cuts needed to avert dangerous warming. Though he didn't make this explicit in his speech, under his cap-and-trade plan McCain would initially give away most of the permits to emit carbon to industries, rather than auctioning them off, as Obama and Clinton would. (This means that under McCain's plan, carbon prices are likely to be lower than under the Democrats - and he'll miss out on the revenue created by an auction system, though McCain says that he'll gradually phase out the permit giveaway...
...picture of his cheating wife's finger. "We actually really put the ring up for sale on eBay, and within four hours, 30,000 people had come by to look or bid on it," Hitch tells me. "The ring was bid up to $760." But eBay shut down the auction after discovering the performance art--a violation of the terms of service, apparently...
...First lesson: The seller is going to win, because he invented the game. Friends in the industry tell me that they way to start collecting rugs is to do your homework, by examining catalogs and prices at big auction houses and dealers, then approach smaller shops and look at a lot of rugs. In other words, develop your own expertise. But who has the time? With a job and a social life, no matter how hard I've worked at trying to distinguish between an Iranian Kurdish sumac and an Azeri kilim, there's little chance that I'm going...
...global warming, for instance, he and Senator Joe Lieberman introduced a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions 60% below 1990 levels by 2050. McCain's recent body language indicates he would not be nearly as comprehensive as the Democrats; he probably would not, for example, auction off the right to pollute for major corporate spewers - which could raise significant funds for alternative-energy research. But the old McCain-Lieberman plan had the look of a half-a-loaf compromise that could eventually get through Congress - and take the global-warming issue off the table in the election...