...with John F'n Kerry (DuMass...er...D-Mass):
http://www.aei.org/outlook/100096Kinda long but very worth it.
Highlights:
Key Points from Kenneth P. Green's Testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance
1.Cap-and-trade is an inappropriate mechanism for the control of greenhouse gases. I observed that this was not only my opinion, but also that of the economists who first developed the concept, as well as people like James Hansen, and the organization Earth First!, neither of which are known to dismiss climate change as a problem. I have subsequently learned that Greenpeace also opposes cap-and-trade as a mechanism for controlling greenhouse gases.
2.Cap-and-trade will fail to control carbon emissions because of inevitable corruptions of the scheme in the political process and afterward in trading markets.
3.Cap-and-trade will, however, cap economic growth, as every time the economy grows, we use more energy, which will increase permit prices, eventually stifling growth.
4.Higher energy prices will increase the costs of goods and services, suppressing demand and killing jobs.
5.Higher energy prices will make American industry less competitive, leading to industry flight and more lost jobs, unless we wish to return to the days of tariff-wars and unfree trade.
6.Current cap-and-trade legislation will cause economic winners and losers both regionally and sectorally across the United States, often unjustly transferring money from poorer communities to more wealthy communities.
7.Cap-and-trade will create a new class of poorly understood financial instruments (PUFIs) that risk creating a bubble far larger than the one that recently knocked the economy into a deep recession.
8.By favoring biofuels, cap-and-trade will put a bounty on ecosystems and lead to massive conversion of forests and prairies into biofuel plantations.
9.The idea that current legislation can be described as a "jobs bill" is ludicrous. One hundred and fifty years of economics tells us that governments do not create jobs, they just move them around, invariably killing more than they create.
