I’m pleasantly surprised a few liberals now admit that, gosh, President Bush was right to oppose the Kyoto Protocol. Sure, many think the climate proposal he offered to G8 leaders at Heiligendamm, Germany leaves lots undone (and in all honesty so do I). But it turns out his belief that China and India must be part of any international agreement sure makes a lot of sense now that China will soon be the world leader in greenhouse gas emissions.
Here’s one twist I didn’t expect from the LA Times (though I’m not completely surprised) – the left coast editors at the Times now oppose the cap and trade framework of Kyoto. They prefer an international agreement based on new carbon taxes.
Let’s not get crazy here. Yes, there are many flaws with Kyoto, but the flaws with cap and trade have to do with implementation. The Europeans took a cap and trade model that was invented by Americans to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions (and did so successfully, by the way) and modified it to the point that it wasn’t really market-based.
It’s better to rely on markets to reduce emissions than to impose a tax that takes innovation-sparking capital out of the marketplace and puts it in government coffers. Let’s not scrap cap and trade – let’s do it the way it was intended. America has shown it can work.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Cap and Trade, International Environmental News, Politics/Government . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
