Full Article Available at FT.com

I largely agree with this assessment. Cap and Trade or Carbon Taxation schemes should be relatively simple to implement, the entire purpose of either system is to apply a direct cost to carbon emissions and to allow the industry to find the most efficient solution, this is overall not that difficult and can fit into a short document one which is largely comprehensible and an easy read. 1,200 Pages suggests nothing except failure to adhere to the original purpose of attaching a cost to carbon and instead a document which will simply skew the market into all manner of perverse incentives. Although I don't particularly find fault with the idea of a pressure valve (I lean more towards a standard per ton tax as a general rule because of the heightened instability involved with a Cap&Trade system) ultimately the analysis is sound, the bill itself seems primarily a feel good measure which won't accomplish anything good.

A similar view comes to health care reform. Half measures don't really help anyone, and the proposals given by congress simply seem to exaggerate the worst parts of our health care system, while making no attempt to actually improve matters for the general public. As it stands I can't really support either issue, and not because I'm not sympathetic to either issue, but because the bills don't really make a genuine attempt to solve the issues.

this is a really good post. i love the financial times.

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"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine

I wonder if anybody caught this particular sentence from the FT article:

"a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers."

This is the crux of AGW - the reduction of our economy and standard of living, and radical changes to our way of life (while raising the standard of living of developing nations and least developed nations which the article doesn't mention but is a theme that is common throughout the AGW world). There is a phrase (there are others, this is just one that I recently found) for this and it's called "contraction and convergence," the contraction being the reduction in CO2 emissions (and hence economies) and the convergence is the converging of GDP's of all nations and also the convergence of incomes both among nations and within nations.

And I checked into the background of the author and found that he was schooled at the LSE which has it's own center for global governance:
The Centre for the Study of Global Governance (LSE)

Interestingly, the energy czar, Carol Browner, was a member of Socialist International's 'Commission for a Sustainable Society' that called for global governance and for the US to reduce it's economy. When this was reported in the Washington Times, Socialist International removed her name from their website.

The last two comments of mine are just a few of the dots that point to what I believe is the use of AGW as a way to achieve global socialism.

Kramer

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“We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. … The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism.”

TheNation, June 7, 2007

That ones actually a bit squishy. Its supposed to be an ineffective tax (effective taxes don't change peoples behavior) So its supposed to hurt in so far as it makes you take an action you wouldn't have chosen otherwise.

At the same time, most plans call for it to be revenue neutral, as it should be, because while you do want to impose a penalty for producing carbon you don't want to just hurt the economy. Which is why carbon taxation can replace sales taxes/income taxes/etc.