Washington Post weighs in on continuing debate over cap and trade vs. carbon tax
Today’s Washington Post (Post) published an Editorial entitled, “Cap and Rage” in which it claims that that Washington politics surrounding health care reform may doom the Senate’s ability to “tackle cap and trade legislation” in the fall. The editorial remarks that the House barely passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act in June and the Senate is having difficulty trying reconcile its members’ differing opinions on aspects of the bill ranging from the amount of allowances to provide various carbon emitting industries to whether cap and trade legislation should be stripped from the bill entirely. The Post editorial offers three reasons to support a carbon tax as an alternative to a cap and trade approach: 1) it is a simpler approach to devise and implement; 2) it requires no new bureaucracy: and 3) the revenue can be rebated to the taxpayer using different approaches.
The editorial also points to an article published in the August 13, 2009, Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article identifies Thomas Crocker, an economist, as an early pioneer/advocate of cap and trade programs to address pollution. Crocker, however, currently is skeptical that cap and trade will be effective for regulating carbon because it is global issue with many different sources and the economic damages are difficult to quantify.
The Post’s support of carbon tax comes at a very important but perhaps late juncture considering many interest groups have solidified their positions for and against the cap and trade approach. (See Yale Environment 360’s “Putting a Price on Carbon” for a summary of the debate on both sides.) With that in mind, the Post’s editorial may turn out to be the proverbial “tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.” Only time will tell what the Senate will do, if it does anything.
