Senator Bob Corker “sounded more like a Greenpeace activist than anything else” at yesterday’s Foreign Relations Committee hearing on climate change, according to one lefty writer. I don’t take Corker to be an advocate for cap-and-trade or for a carbon tax (as the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin dubs him). What I take him to be saying is that this Congress is likely to take action to reduce carbon emissions, that a carbon tax would be superior to cap-and-trade, and that there are better and worse versions of cap-and-trade. If we are to have cap and trade, Corker believes, we should auction off the permits rather than giving them away, and we should return the proceeds to taxpayers. He is very tough on the US Climate Action Partnership proposal, which he blasted in a dear-colleague letter last week as a big corporate-welfare giveaway. (He used more diplomatic language.)

Liberals agree with some of his views about how cap-and-trade should ideally be designed, but suspect that he is laying the predicates to oppose a cap-and-trade bill. My sense is that he is keeping his options open and will make a decision based on what the final bill looks like.