I'm expanding on a comment I made on a great diary on the cap-and-trade regulatory victory over acid rain, as a "frame" for interpreting Cap & Trade on carbon emissions.
Market-based solutions framed by government is the only practical method -- beyond tyranny, depression II, or having half the people die through some awful calamity -- to have any hope in hell of preventing environmental collapse.
Without caps, the sky is the limit. Who doesn't like a limitless cap -- you know, like "property values will rise forever"?
The government represents the people; the people must be saved; thus the government must save the people.
Cap and Trade is not a tax -- it's evening the playing field. Coal, for example, simply doesn't pay for the damage it's doing to our future. Therefore it's cheaper (now) than other energy systems that go to costly lengths to not to do damage.
In the late '80s, I wrote an essay on a "damage tax," how we needed to develop a means of assessing the true environmental and human costs of all products, at every stage.
This "true cost taxation" included taxing sweatshop imports, taxing polluters, taxing stripmined products, etc. The taxes/fees would go into arena-specific funds directed at helping the problem itself: remediation of pollutants, funding solar panels, recovering the earth, underwriting human rights, and the like.
The challenge, of course, is in assessing such fine-grained taxes.
Cap and trade makes sense. If we accept that must grapple with what we do, in terms of draining, defiling, and destroying irreplaceable resources, then humans must set some limits.
The repubs are trying to frame Cap and Trade as an "energy tax," something that will be just "passed on to the consumer."
But as that great diary makes clear, that's not the way it works. These kinds of regulations promote efficiencies, which almost always saves money and can decrease cost. No industry wants to price themselves out of the market, especially these days; the market will respond to predictability, and reward efficiencies.
It's not an "energy tax" -- it's "evening the playing field for energy." Coal, for example, simply doesn't pay for the long-term damage it's doing, damage costs that renewable energy sources have gone to huge expense to avoid. Is that fair? How does the environment stand a chance of defending itself on that playing field?
In the current economic system, there is no potent driver promoting carbon efficiency at the consumer level, nor at the industrial level.
We have to "even the playing field," so that humans have a chance.