Last winter, one of the reporters assigned to cover McCain was, by training, largely an environmental writer. As with having someone from Iraq on board, or someone from a financial publication, her depth of knowledge in a specific subject allowed her to ask McCain questions — and to make points — we generalists didn’t have at our fingertips. She used to go round-and-round with him on carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade. McCain’s principle argument against carbon taxes is their effect on low-income consumer. This environmental reporter would point out that cap and trade raises prices for them too, that, in fact, as Joe points out, if you want to lower carbon emissions, someone is going to have to pay. Carbon taxes would hit low income consumers harder and faster, maybe, but cap and trade raises prices all along the spectrum as well. McCain’s usual response to how cap-and-trade is better is that it creates a slightly more direct incentive for research into and production of “green technologies.” This is true enough, but this line of reasoning always struck me as, ahem, a deus ex machina solution: Joe and Jane Six-Pack won’t have to pay higher prices in relation to carbon consumption because somewhere down the line, Dr. Frankfurter invented a way for widget manufacturers to turn carbon emissions into chocolate bars! Won’t that take awhile? And couldn’t it be expensive?
For his part, Obama has called for a “Clean Technologies Deployment Venture Capital Fund,” to help speed the production of chocolate-bar technologies. McCain, to judge by his Weirdly Germanic Initial Caps Policy as Stated on his Web Site, would rely on various sub-markets of the carbon market created by cap and trade to fund such research:
Emissions Permits Will Eventually Be Auctioned To Support The Development Of Advanced Technologies. A portion of the process of these auctions will be used to support a diversified portfolio of research and commercialization challenges, ranging from carbon capture and sequestration, to nuclear power, to battery development. Funds will also be used to provide financial backing for a Green Innovation Financing and Transfer (GIFT) to facilitate commercialization.
John McCain Will Streamline The Process For Deploying New Technologies And Requiring More Accountability From Government Programs To Meet Commercialization Goals And Deadlines.
John McCain Will Ensure Rapid Technology Introduction, Quickly Shifting Research From The Laboratory To The Marketplace.
John McCain Will Employ The Inherent Incentives Provided By A Cap-And-Trade System Along With Government-Led Competitions As Incentives For New Technology Deployment.
I am, obviously, simplifying things. And I do agree with Joe that McCain’s policies are requiring him to do some ideological backbends — he knows, I think, that carbon reduction will cost something, to someone, but he has to make that seem as much like a function of markets as possible.