Carol's Closet: Big Foot Strikes Again!

While Gore uses 20 times the energy of the rest of us schmucks, Friedman favors economy killing gasoline taxes to keep the unwashed proletariat down. He’s even gone so far, in the mother have all vocabulary bastardizations, to rename the gas tax “Freedom Tax”. Friedman asked, “Who’s Afraid Of A Gas Tax.” Certainly not his chauffer.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

The next bubble is in carbon credits, a booming trillion dollar cap-and-trade market that barely even exists yet. If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become scarcer with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time.
Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. Different from a plain carbon tax, the cap-and-trade system envisioned by Goldman is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Again, the position of weakness in the debate about taxes the Democratic party has let itself to get in has made of a ‘carbon tax’ a bad word that will have to be replaced by a ‘cap-and-trade’ system from which not only companies like Goldman will be able to profit but also could end up in another bubble.