= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Yosarian2 comments on You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (221)
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.