It’s been a while since I did a post on CO2 emissions. In my last post, I explained how cap-and-trade (i.e. emissions trading) works. We also found that a true cap-and-trade policy is not any sort of tax. In fact, we found that it’s actually a market solution to the problem that markets are not always efficient at solving pollution problems. Even some extreme libertarians think it’s a brilliant way to reduce the need for government intervention and let the market solve it’s own problems.
Now a while back, one commenter said that he’d support laws reducing CO2 growth if there was “evidence that the net benefits of the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions exceed the net costs of doing so.”
Well, let’s start with the assumption that we’ve just waved our magic wand and we now have a world wide treaty (that no one plans to ever violate) that lays out how we can reduce CO2 growth in, say, 50 to 100 years but adds does not add additional costs to carbon, or at least none without plenty of time to prepare alternative energy sources first.