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Responding to my post detailing the CBO's finding that cap-and-trade would do little to discourage driving, Anon writes:
Two related points:One, your chart is about world emissions, not US emissions. In the US, we do a lot more driving then the rest of the world and we do a lot less burning of forests. Consequently, transportation (Airline, Commercial, and Consumer) account for about 29% of our emissions. This is about 10% air travel and 90% ground travel. So, while your point is important (that the slight increase in cost from a cap-and-trade scheme isn't likely to drastically reduce consumption), it is a little less true for the US.Of course the implication of your point, then, is that including transport fuels in a carbon-tax/cap-and-trade scheme may do less substantive good than the political harm which comes from oil lobbyists and the GOP screaming about higher gas prices (we may not like them, but we ignore them at our political peril). A lower cap, as a % of emissions, focused on industrial and electricity generation, coupled with aggressive measures to increase the efficiency of the US vehicle fleet and eventually transition to electric vehicles may be a political winner without a marked substantive impact. But good luck convincing the environmental community of that.Anon is right. The implications of the CBO report are pretty clearly that you should try and somehow exempt gasoline from a cap-and-trade plan, and instead work to reduce vehicle carbon consumption through other measures. Given that the prime liability -- or maybe even fatal vulnerability -- of any global warming legislation is that acute pain Americans are feeling at the pump, there's some real political merit to the idea. I considered writing that in the original post, but haven't spent nearly enough time thinking through the implications to actually argue for such a policy. But I'd be interested to see other folks weigh in.
