| Sourced From |

San Francisco — As Congress considers clean-energy and climate legislation, most of the fuss has been about whether (and how) to use price signals to encourage clean energy and reduce our dependence on dirty fossil fuels. Should we have a cap-and-auction system (as President Obama prefers), a carbon tax (as many economists have argued), or cap and trade (as the House recently voted)? Or, should we just pretend that energy markets work just fine without price signals, as the Republican leadership and the Chamber of Commerce seem to prefer? Markets where you don’t have to pay for what you use (in this case, the planet’s limited carbon sinks) used to be associated with communism. Now they’re the heart of a weird cult that calls itself conservatism.

But the argument has begun to shift a bit. Now the question is, if we have a market price on dumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere, does that mean we don’t need any other reforms of our energy sector in order to create a clean-energy future, cut our dependence on imported oil, and stabilize the climate? That’s not the approach taken by the recently passed Waxman-Markey bill (H.R. 2454). It includes a robust, if partial, suite of investment and regulatory features. But some macro-economists (and some figures in Congress) clearly see a price signal as a substitute for comprehensive energy market reform. Harvard’s Robert Stavins recently wrote

Related posts:

1. UPDATE:UK To Set Out Broad Strategy On Low CO2 Energy In July
2. Time to mesh carbon reduction policies with U.S
3. Lighten up on carbon reduction
4. Research and Markets: China Holds One-Third of the Total Global Carbon Reduction Credits, a Proportion which is Expected to Increase to 41 Percent by 2012
5. A New Form Of Approach By Employing Permits To Control CO2 Emission

Tags: carbon reductions, carbon sink, Carbon Tax