Yeah, just like the free market in land ownership works out so stunningly for all concerned in Latin America!

There's this little question of who gets to own the property -- that pesky question that keeps coming up in Latin America -- that also applies to cap and trade.

Huge profits are made by transferring costs from the individual firm to the public at large. This is a normal and natural part of capitalism as seen by most wingnutters.

To address Steve's concern, there are ways to deal with the market distortions caused by concentrated wealth.

In any case, we have to stop treating the atmosphere as a common sewer.

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Crony capitalism only has one rational principle: Me First. Everything else follows this. Any other consideration claimed is pure BS, meant to serve "ME 1st."

Hate to admit it, but for once their lapdogs, the Repukelickin's, are right. The answer to this is socialism. Not their kind of topsy-turvey national socialism: Real mixed-market democratic socialism, of an uniquely American kind.

It's time we gave all these right-tards the coup de grace.
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Regarding Mr. Krugman's continued dependency on market forces: We've seen how "the dependability of the market" produced bundled investment packages "ad nauseum" to contain a spiked proliferation of toxic debt. What prevents the same thing from happening here? Suppose some "Wizard from the 'Street" concocts a new way to bundle a cap-&-trade permit, and the end result turns "n" amount of permit into something that looks twenty times its size? The regulatory capacity to prevent this just doesn't exist---and a spiked proliferation, in this case, could be a Pandora's Box of many terrible things....

Did NESHAPS cause industry to be innovative or did it cause many industries to move industry outside the U.S. How much innovation has taken place to build new refineries or chemical plants to comply with the NESHAPS and the CAA?

Yeh. Krugman's plan is exactly right -- to convince industry to invest heavily for the next three years in the Republican party to throw out Obama and all the longterm costs of his program.

Duh. What's Dr. K thinking?

The lesson of California's Phillip Burton, as partly visible on his statue:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3275/2475317929_64de0cc38e.jpg
"The only way to deal with the exploiters is to terrorize the bastards."

Thank you for the post Hilzoy.

We need more attention on cap and trade because the only way the GOP will ever allow passage of it under any form, is if Democrats and the nation drag Republicans and their oil industry cronies kicking and screaming toward progress.

I expect this to be the fiercest and nastiest fight waged by Republican against the Obama administration, surpassing the attacks against health care reform by far. This hits Republicans closest to home, and they won't go down without one hell of a fight.

There's this little question of who gets to own the property -- that pesky question that keeps coming up in Latin America -- that also applies to cap and trade.

Under a cap and trade program, the people (through the government) own the property, and sell off the rights to pollute part of it via auction. It's not really so difficult. The current system, or one in which the permits would not be auctioned off, would be much more like land under Latin America's traditional oligopolies, since only a relatively few corporations pollute without incurring the social costs.

The real problem with US cap and trade is that it is for domestic fuel consumption only. This will drive energy intensive industries across the border, or overseas and the carbon will enter the atmosphere without the tax, and probably with even fewer pollution controls than if the businesses stayed here.

This is a global problem. The best solution would be to create a worldwide limit on carbon fuel use.

The 2% reduction in 2050 actually implies a large per-capita reduction as we can expect our US population to grow at 1.5% a year. If this 2% reduction includes the carbon footprint of all the foreign products we import, then the figure is only mildly encouraging. But we really need something like an 80% reduction in output of carbon, not 2%.

Something needs to be done immediately, or Mother Nature is going to impose a cap on the human species.

With no trading.

Maybe there's some recursive form at work in the universe: Black holes have the beautiful power of concentrating mass, time, energy and all that other stuff, and as they get more massive, they bleed more and more of the "real" assets of the "known universe" into singularities. With a lot of what we puny humans choose to call "violence." Jets of deadly energy, gravity gradients that rip everything else to shreds to feed the insatiable collective lust of those things whose reality we acknowledge but whose "motives" are so hard for ordinarly mortals to understand.

Sounds like a lot of kleptocrats I hear about.