A “cap and trade” approach to greenhouse gases shrinks from the real issue.

A fundamental problem with "cap and trade" is that environmentalists hear "CAP and trade" and businesses hear "cap and TRADE" and/or "cap and EVADE." Trying to design a system that manipulates market forces to achieve indirectly what some are afraid to talk about directly will not achieve the necessary reductions of greenhouse gases. For example, those who mine, transport, and burn coal are going to fight just as fiercely against a market manipulation system that eliminates coal combustion as they would against a regulation directly banning it. If we want the burning of coal to stop--and we should absent carbon capture and sequestration--we need to confront the issue directly and pay the politically necessary compensation.

Update on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 04:12PM by Skeptic

Getting Real on Climate Change by Nordhaus and Shellenberger: 

For 20 years the green climate change agenda has embraced two insidious orthodoxies that are rooted in market fundamentalism:  Deficit spending is always bad for the economy, and we should "let the market decide" our energy future.  The result has been serial political failure, skyrocketing emissions, and stagnation of energy technology.  Now is the time to let go of the pollution-pricing paradigm, along with a zero-sum dificit mentality, and embrace an agenda squarely focused on public investment, building the enabling infrastructure, and making clean energy cheap.

Joe Romm (Climate Progress) seems to hate these guys and the horse they rode in on, but I wonder if he wouldn't agree with that quotation.  The article has much information about the declining fortunes of "cap and trade" in Congress and failures in practice where it has been tried.