“It sounds like alchemy, an act of bureaucratic magic. Under the climate-change bill just approved by a House committee, the U.S. government would literally make a commodity — as tradable as a Pontiac or a pork belly — out of thin air. The bill would require polluters to obtain ‘allowances’ — permits allowing them to emit a given amount of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide or methane. Today, these gases are invisible, free and floating all around us. This bill would put a price on them…. But a closer look through the bill’s 940-plus pages shows that selling chunks of air still might not be its most radical idea. The proposal would also create official carbon ‘offsets’ — in some cases, a government-certified hypothetical calculation of an amount of gases that would have been emitted but were not. Those, too, could be bought by polluters.” (Washington Post, Tuesday)
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FEE Timely Classic
“How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming” by Gene Callahan
