Word: caps
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Climate policy wonks - who try to explain this complex stuff for a living - admired the clarity and power with which McCain described the cap-and-trade system, which would set a declining limit on global warming pollution, then let companies sell their excess pollution permits for a profit. "For all of the last century," he said, "the profit motive basically led in one direction - toward machines, methods and industries that used oil and gas." He praised the good that came from that growth but pointed out that there were "costs we weren?t counting. And these terrible costs have added...
...drive down costs even further, he proposes an even more controversial cost-containment idea. His plan would allow the unlimited use of so-called offsets, or pollution credits purchased from carbon-reduction projects outside the cap-and-trade system. In other words, a coal-fired utility in Ohio wouldn't have to reduce its carbon emissions if it bought enough offsets from, say, a forest preserve that promised not to clear-cut its timber. A certain number of offsets make sense - as long as they are real and verified (which is hard to ensure). But many policy analysts fear that...
...catastrophic consequences of climate change and vowed that he would not "shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears" - was most remarkable for what it said about the changing politics of global warming. It is difficult to imagine a Republican candidate for President calling for a mandatory cap-and-trade system that would reduce U.S. carbon emissions to 60% below 1990 levels by 2025, as McCain does, or insisting on engagement with rising developing countries like China and India. It's sign that global warming has reached the mainstream, that it will be increasingly difficult to find politicians...
Like Obama and Clinton, McCain is calling for a mandatory cap-and-trade program that would gradually tighten limits on national carbon emissions, with the goal of reducing emissions to 60% below 1990 levels by 2050. (A number of similar bills have already been introduced to Congress, including one by McCain himself and another, by Senator Joseph Lieberman and John Warner, that has made it past the Senate's environment committee.) Like Obama and Clinton, and increasingly most mainstream environmentalists, McCain wants to let the private market do the work of cutting emissions, by effectively putting a price on carbon...
...from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and weaker than the Warner-Lieberman bill, which is seen by 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...