Like a carbon tax, but much worse
Margaret Wente
If you want to put a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, there’s an easy way to do it. You implement a carbon tax, like British Columbia did, and add it to the price of gasoline and other fossil fuels. The higher the emissions, the more tax people pay. Anyone can understand how it works.
Then there’s a second way, which is much more complicated and expensive. It requires a big bureaucracy to administer and is highly vulnerable to special interests. Lots can go wrong. In Europe, where they’ve been trying to get it right for a decade, it’s been an abject failure. This system is called cap and trade, and nobody but the experts can understand how it works.