“Sorry..but dims don’t do logic...demagogy yes”
Mike Goldfarb: Some people are perplexed by your rhetoric on global warming. Is this one of those ‘no surrender’ issues, or is there room for discussion?
McCain: There’s always room for discussion. But I don’t know how any conservative can not support cap and trade. We did it with acid rain. The Europeans are putting it into effect. It’s a capitalist process that encourages green technologies. If we’re wrong, all we’ve done is adopt green technologies, in an effort to give our kids a greener planet.
As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world.
Cap and trade, in it’s pure form, is an excellent free-market method of handling REAL pollution and environmental impacts.
It allows us to spend money where it is MOST effective, so we all get the most benefit.
That’s why it was good for acid rain, which we all agree was something we wanted to eliminate. Also smog-causing chemicals would be good to cut.
For example, we use a very wasteful system for cars. We mandated a lot of special requirements for cutting exhaust, some of which cost us gas mileage. And most cities have strict standards for new cars, so you have to spend money to keep your car at peak “exhaust” efficiency — while old cars are exempt.
If instead they had simply taxed everybody the cost of the annual inspections, and used the money to buy people’s old cars, we could have doubled the value of our spending.
The problem here is that we have no evidence that C02 is actually a problem — and some possibility that we need MORE, not LESS, C02.
So even a free-market cap-and-trade won’t be any good, because we don’t know what we are trying to accomplish.
Of course, the Senate bill wasn’t a free-market cap-and-trade, it was a big-government socialistic cap-and-trade.
A free-market system would be revenue neutral, and would simply apply a flat tax to the exhaust you were trying to eliminate. A business that could cut lots of exhaust would spend money to do so, a business where there is little to gain would pay the tax because it would be cheaper. Over time, money would ensure that the “problem” was solved starting with the biggest bang for a buck.