Word: capping
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Climate leadership will come not from this President but from the next. So how will voters be able to tell which candidate is going to take real action? If there's a canary in this coal mine, it's the policy known as cap and trade, an idea Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp calls a "silver bullet." Where do the candidates really stand on cap and trade--and how does it work, anyway...
...think about cap and trade is as a carbon diet. When utilities or oil refiners are put on the regimen, their annual carbon emissions are measured, and they receive a stack of pollution allowances giving them the right to emit that much carbon in a year. Then the emissions are reduced, year by year. Like all diets, this one's hard to stick to. It's also expensive, since emitters have to invest in technologies to reduce their pollution. But there are incentives. Constraints on carbon boost prices, which means that alternative sources of power become competitive. What's more...
That's the trade in cap and trade, and it harnesses the power of the marketplace to fight warming, a concept that helped Republicans like McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, fall in love with the idea. What's more, it works. Cap and trade was used in the 1990s to limit sulfur dioxide emissions and help tame acid rain. The most promising piece of green legislation now on Capitol Hill, co-sponsored by independent Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia, is a cap-and-trade proposal. The bill is popular, but that doesn...
...billion for R&D over the next 20 years. Even so, politicians who represent what's left of America's coal-fired industrial heartland aren't rushing to support the bill during hard economic times. To bring them around, the bill's supporters must make the case that cap and trade's costs are dwarfed by its benefits--not just averting a climate catastrophe but also jump-starting clean-energy industries and creating millions of new "green collar" jobs...
...giveaway and auction, a seemingly fair approach but one that has split enviros--some of whom see the bill as weak. Industry is ambivalent too. The National Association of Manufacturers is dug in against the bill. A large and growing number of corporations know that a cap is inevitable, though few have come out in favor of Lieberman-Warner. And all this leaves unanswered the problem of how to ensure that carbon-constrained U.S. businesses aren't hurt in global trade...