"I am a global warming alarmist."

Global Warming Alarmism

But perhaps even more pernicious is the way that “carbon credits” are distributed.

The credits are best described as a pulled-out-of-thin-air government-created fiat currency, that is accepted only by the government in exchange for the government’s permission to let you emit CO2. (If ever a system was perfectly set up to be abused and politicized by politicians, this is it.)

Government bureaucrats will decide sector by sector and industry by industry which companies get the credits. Implicitly, that same decision by government regulators also determines which companies will need to buy credits from the politically-connected companies who could get their carbon credits for free.

Update: From a related Coyote Blog post, entitled "How Mussolini-Style Fascism Almost Came to the US":

First, it was the National Recovery Act, where FDR explicitly tried to creat an economic system modelled on Mussolini-style fascism. This was killed by the Supreme Court. But the will of government to create an economic system where private companies win and lose based on how well connected they are to politicians never goes away. The latest attempt to set up such a managed system was via the Lieberman-Warner climate bill...