National Post - The closer the United States gets to adopting a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gas emissions, the more frightening it gets.
"... As outlined by National Post columnist David Frum this week, the bill would include a system in which carbon emitters could buy the right to continue emitting by purchasing credits from cleaner companies. This is a key feature of cap-and-trade plans, but Democrats have stacked the deck by proposing to award allotments of emission credits, free of charge, to "clean" firms, which could then earn billions by selling them to big emitters."
Not because the plan now under debate in the U. S. Congress would complicate the lives of energy producers, or impose new costs on consumers. Those drawbacks might be bearable if the system was truly designed to reduce emissions, and if the expense was reasonable. The alarm results from increasing evidence that emissions have become a secondary concern of a plan whose main purpose is to serve the partisan interests of the Democratic Party.
Jim Prentice, Canada's Minister of the Environment, visited Washington this week to warn in no uncertain terms that the proposal before Congress would be a "prescription for disaster" for U. S. trade relations.