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CronoDAS comments on You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof - Less Wrong
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I think more relevant is that a lot of the policies "designed to mitigate AGW" aren't designed to mitigate AGW - they are, as you mentioned, policies which people were calling for already. The real policies to mitigate AGW are things like carbon taxes, which no-one would have proposed if AGW wasn't being considered.
For the record, I've read that cap-and-trade worked very well when it was applied to sulfur emissions (which cause acid rain).
I'm all for some version of cap-and-trade for carbon as long as incumbent polluters or politically favored groups don't get huge discounts on permits.
The problem with cap-and-trade in the U.S. is that it will become a huge fund for bribing special interests.
Yeah, that's a potential risk.
That being said, I think that some of the issues that were called "bribes" made sense from a policy perspective; for example, part of the cap-and-trade bill was that for the first few years, a number of carbon credits would be given to power companies, because they didn't want a sudden spike in the cost of electricity.
Still, even with those trade-offs, I still think it would work as a policy; even if you're getting carbon credits for free for the first few years, you still now have a motivation to reduce emissions if you can, since then you can sell off the extra carbon credits to other companies that can't reduce carbon emissions as easily. And those free credits would decrease every year anyway. Meanwhile, all of those credits were still included under the "cap", the maximum total amount of carbon that could be released.
I think that a cap-and-trade policy could be an effective way to let the market figure out what the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions are.
CronoDAS: Can you clarify what you mean by "worked very well"? Do you specifically mean that the policy was effective at reducing sulfur emissions? (As opposed to, e.g. saying that it reduced sulfur emissions with minimal negative short-term economic impact.)
There's a fair bit of evidence that it both reduced sulfur dioxide emission and had little negative economic impact. See this article which discusses a lot of these issues and what can be learned going forwards about how to apply cap and trade systems for other pollutants.