Capping, trading and saving the planet

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
––Ansel Adams, photographer and environmental activist

I would guess that Teddy Roosevelt, the second-greatest Republican president after Abraham Lincoln, would have lobbied for a federal cap-and-trade program.

Mind you, that’s only a guess, but I have history to support my position. I’ll get to that later. First, a cap-and-trade primer.

We heard a great deal about cap-and-trade in the 2008 presidential election and during President Obama’s first six months in office. If passed by Congress and signed by the president, cap-and-trade would limit greenhouse-gas emissions –– in particular carbon dioxide –– produced by factories and power plants to help stave off global warming. If companies exceeded limits on those emissions, they could upgrade their facilities to bring them into compliance with the law or buy emissions credits from the federal government at auction. The government would then pump that money into renewable-energy projects to lower greenhouse-gas emissions.Companies could later sell their credits for a profit, so long as they complied with emissions standards.

At first, Obama did as he said he would during the campaign: He lobbied hard for a federal cap-and-trade program. There was, of course, a Republican backlash. Cap-and-trade would mean the death knell of American industry by raising the cost of doing business and thus giving China, Russia and India one more competitive advantage, the GOP claimed again and again. In 2009, Obama was working furiously to pass health-care reform, so rather than battle the Republican marketing machine on two fronts, he dropped cap-and-trade. He has hardly spoken of it since.