You dont see anything wrong with allowing a energy producer to pollute all they want as long as they buy some credits? Let me repeat my abortion analogy, and turn it to something more drastic.

Murder is bad. To control it, lets cap it per state. States with less murder can sell their murder credits to other states with high murder rates. This will create a free market for murder, and make it real expensive to have murder in your state, and thus make states work harder to get rid of it.

This of course assumes that carbon emmisions are bad, which many of us dont think so. So now we are going to tell businesses that they have ghosts, and ghosts are bad, so lets cap ghosts, and you can trade them if you need more ghosts.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

Energy producers will stop polluting when it costs them money. So either they take the cost and transfer that to their customers, or, they realize they will lose competivity buy doing so, and they will make their installations more environmental friendly.

You prefer to put polluters on the electric chair?

I leave the carbon open for another discussion, I'm not such a believer myself. What I do know that clean energy will give us clean air again, apart from the CO2. It will stop US dependency on ME oil, and it will most likely also stop noise pollution from the car engines. It's about time to move away from fossil fuels. One day or another we will run out anyway, so now would be a good time to start funding, researching and developing clean alternatives.

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Exposing the dark side.

Energy producers will stop polluting when there is clear evidence that pollution is harmful to citizens, and laws are made that make it a criminal offense. There is no free market for harming americans lives. Look at mercury or abestos. Did we need a free market for abestos? No. We recognized how significantly harmful it was to citizens and banned it. That is the job of govt. It is not the job of govt to discourage murder, but to stop it dead, no pun intended.

You either take a stand and say carbon emmissions are harming citizens and make it a criminal offense to pollute, or say they arent, and let peopel get on with their lives. But this requires solid science, something that does not exist when it comes to carbon. We know that abestos kills, that murder kills, we do not know that carbon kills.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

The problem is that there is plenty of science about the things you are neglecting to mention: sulfur dioxide, for one, and although you say "Look at mercury", coal-fired power plants are also the largest polluter of toxic mercury pollution, particle emmissions, etc....

Your laissez-faire attitude towards solid science interferes with a rational opinion in this case.

Mercury has been succesfuly controlled by simple legal limits, not free market trading. And while there may be plenty of science, there is no solid proveable beyond a doubt evidence that carbon is bad, that humans emitting carbon is bad. When there is, I expect the govt to do its job and protect my life from others who are polluting.

Obama is going to play a dangerous game with peoples lives and wealth simply because of the special interests of the democratic party. Lets look at what else he had to say on energy:

Other places he says his policies will cause electricity to skyrocket. Someone show me where in the constitution it gives the federal govt the power to tell us how we will generate power.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

jviehe, there's no solid proveable beyond a doubt evidence of anything.

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Whan they come, Ah sall staun mah grun
Staun mah grun, an be na afraid.
Thochts ae hame tak awa mah fear
Sweat an bluid hide mah veil o tears.

Pretty distorted take on that.

Obama was saying that the cap and trade system would punish polluters...Traditional coal fired power plants are huge polluters, so under a cap and trade system, building a new dirty coal power plant is not financially viable.

So, does that kill off energy production? No... it's an incentive to build "Clean" coal power plants. They would have higher startup costs, but they contain/destroy the polluting byproducts and do not release them into the atmosphere which alleviates greehouse gas production and airborne pollutants.

The merits of the cap and trade system can be debated. That would be fair and intellectually honest. But the OP is an attempt to oversimplify and distort the issue for the......well for anyone foolish enough to believe it.

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The world could use more Stan Ovshinsky's

Normally I would be inclined to agree with you. In this case, though, the change we need to make is far more drastic (and expensive) than replacing asbestos in construction or lead in paint and plumbing. There is nothing more basic to our economy than energy, except maybe agriculture. And even agriculture is highly energy-dependent.

If we were simply to ban fossil fuels in a heavy-handed manner, the way we banned asbestos or mercury or lead, the economic results would be catastrophic. Almost all cars, trucks, trains, planes, and farm machinery run on petroleum products. 70% of our nation's electricity is produced from fossil fuels. A lot of homes are heated and illuminated by them, food cooked with them and preserved by them. We need to stop burning them, but we can't do it all at once. We need to do it in a phased-in/phased-out manner, replacing fossil fuels with greater efficiency and non-greenhouse energy sources, and setting parameters and weights on the market is one way to do that.