THE American people have elected a Democratic president and congressional majority. It is incumbent on conservatives to try to work productively with the new leadership until the next election. Part of the role of loyal opposition is to pick battles wisely. We need to focus major disagreements on political issues that are significant—issues on which either victory is possible, or laying down a marker for future elections is critical. One obvious example of such an issue is so-called cap-and-trade legislation.
The premise behind cap-and-trade is that carbon-dioxide emissions will produce increasingly severe global warming, and that we therefore should force reductions in the use of the fossil fuels that generate most U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions in order to avoid some of the damage they are predicted to cause. Cap-and-trade is often presented by advocates as a complicated, technocratic, and “market-oriented” approach to the problem, but in plain English cap-and-trade is simple: It is carbon rationing. Basically, the federal government would make it illegal, in most cases, to emit carbon dioxide at scale without a ration card. Government officials would decide how much carbon dioxide the U.S. would emit in a given year (that’s the “cap” part), print up only that many ration cards, auction them off, and then allow people to buy and sell them (that’s the “trade” part).
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