Cap and trade

From Conservapedia

"Cap and trade" is the name used to describe one controversial approach to the issue of global warming. Cap and trade presumes that global warming is a real phenomenon and is caused entirely or mostly by human activity, and can therefore be solved by placing limitations on the amount of carbon dioxide businesses are allowed to release into the environment. The system would set up a bureaucracy to set a "cap" for emissions and then monitor the carbon emissions of every company, and would allow companies who come in below the cap to sell their extra cap space to companies that come in over the cap.

This method has been endorsed by Al Gore, Barack Obama and John McCain.

Even if global warming were proven to be a real and man-made phenomenon, it is highly questionable whether "cap and trade" would have any effect other than to create an expensive and intrusive bureaucracy, and create opportunities for scam artists to milk the system by setting up non-producing companies which would then get unused cap space that they could trade with others. The basic criticism is that cap-and-trade has no real effect on pollution as it allows non-polluters to simply sell other companies the right to pollute, increasing costs without creating any benefit. Also, existing polluters are either grandfathered in (and allowed to keep polluting at whatever level) or they are blackmailed to buying the right to pollute from a third party, all under the premise that the activity in which they are engaged has been conclusively deemed to be bad.