Carbon Candor

A fascinating opinion article over on Wall Street Journal points out new testimony by NASA global warming alarmist James Hansen, where he tells Congress not to start jimmying around with the carbon credit system to pick winners and losers.

He says, in effect, if you're going to have a carbon tax, give the money to the people and tax the businesses evenly, and don't make it some kind of source of green blackmail money.

I'd agree to that, except I'd go one further. I'd say, give the credits to individual American citizens and let them sell, buy, keep or spend them. If Greenies want to drive up the cost by buying and retiring the credits, let them. That way, at least, the system is content-neutral, and whoever can reduce their carbon imprint can automatically make money by doing so. You will see companies moving as quickly as they can to add efficiency to their methods.

You'd also want to figure out how you were going to calculate the carbon released or sequestered by an activity, so that the whole system worked effectively.

Another caveat on that is that Congress needs to make sure that no employer can have anything to say about their employees' credits.