Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade System

[TNF]

Neither will do anything to significantly reduce the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere.

1) Carbon taxation will either be dodged (employers will relocate overseas or to areas with lax regulatory environments, i.e. the American South), the cost passed onto the consumer, or will be ineffective entirely because other nations won't adopt the same tax because they'd see doing so as pointing them at a competitive disadvantage with the United States.

2) Cap and trade will create another economic bubble and will probably cause an economic collapse as speculators buy up pollution credits and sell them off in a haphazard fashion. This tends to happen when you create markets out of thin air (no pun intended), and this would have pretty terrible effects indeed. Also, there's no guarantee of American Capital complying with it, because we have to remember that they're willing to relocate and then ship goods back into the U.S. because those sort of activities are financially advantageous to them.

The only thing that will make possible a shift to carbon neutral or low emission forms of energy is a shift in the mode of production. Capitalism is incapable of "going green" because it relies on the profit motive. A socialist society, one in which the means of production are owned by the whole of the people and the economy democratically planned, could solve the climate change crisis in a decade, if not sooner. Under a socialized system, we could immediately call for a halting to the extraction of coal, fracking, and drilling for oil. Without capitalists to protest, these activities could be curtailed and the workers who work those projects given a just transition to new jobs building the kind of renewable power stations that we need in order to cut out the bulk of carbon emissions.

We could stop the production of the internal-combustion engine based car, perhaps after a period of time, and start the production on a mass scale of automated electric vehicles. We could have squads of workers moving around the country, helping to reftrofit buildings to make them energy efficient, helping socialize agriculture and take it out of the hands of the sprawl inducing agribusiness capitalists, etc. The myriad of technological innovations kept from the market by the capitalist profit motive (the electric car, chiefly), and new innovations (vertical farms, lab-grown meat, etc) could be introduced on a nationwide basis. And, of course, as socialism has to be international if it's to be anything, these new technologies and techniques could be exported abroad to our sister socialist societies that would inevitably arise in the wake of the collapse of American imperialism.

Eventually, I think the whole of the planet will be under a socialized economic and political system. We'll be able to plan on a planet-wide system and bring the weather under our control, build grand cities even greater than those of today, and explore the universe. Perhaps the crisis of climate change will hasten the need to do so.

[TNF]

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Why should people who didn't create the crisis pay for it? The only people who should be asked to pay more are those who profit from the destruction of the planet. Not the people who are already having a hard enough time trying to get by.

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Because capitalism is inherently unstable and creating yet another market for speculators to speculate in (one not tied to any actual, tangible product, mind you), is a recipe for disaster in and of itself? Have you been asleep for the past decade or so?