Cap And Trade Will Not Happen

TW: I have been skeptical on cap n'trade from day one. It is the wrong approach to a very serious issue. It has one thing going for it, it is something, in the face of a status quo that is leading to a failure and a Republican opposition that has no serious alternative. The current bill has been so bastardized (i.e. giving away the credits) that is almost entirely dependent upon future legislation anyway, future legislation that is begging to be a victim of regulatory capture.

Yet I suspect Obama is going to have to put so much focus and use so much political capital to get health care done that cap n'trade will be delayed until next year which means it will not happen until at least post 2010 elections (when Republicans may very well gain seats).

But remember the status quo is failing therefore to do nothing (the Republican approach) is a greater failure.

From Joe Klein at Time:
"...The most important point here is that policies like this, which are difficult for most people to understand (and which, in this case, according to the polls, is far down the list of voters' priorities), have to be kept as simple as possible. And they have to work. A carbon tax swap--the revenues used to lower payroll taxes--not only would send important price signals about the use of fossil fuels, it would benefit workers at the lower end of the economic spectrum, especially those, as Jesse Jackson used to say, who "take the early bus" to work. I think that if Barack Obama spends this year focusing on the economy and health care, he could focus--and convince the public--on the need for this sort of tax swap next year. As written, the Waxman-Markey bill will achieve very little in term of carbon reduction, could create a huge new bureaucracy to monitor emissions and will give polluters an excuse to raise rates unduly (although the various carrots included for alternative energy research and deployment are obviously worth enacting). According to several Administration sources, it's dead in the water for this year, in any case.