Special Series
Climate Fairness
In a Series
Cap-and-Cashback: Regional Fairness
As regular readers know, we’ve done a bit of cheerleading for the “cap and dividend’ concept – which is also called “Cap-and-Cashback,” since it would hand cash receipts from government-run carbon auctions right back to consumers. Cap-and-Cashback strikes us as a fundamentally fair climate policy, since it protects low- and middle-income families from the effects of rising energy prices.
Yet some people criticize cap-and-dividend as being unfair, because they think it could benefit some regions of the country at the expense of others. I’ve even seen this issue described as a “fatal flaw” in Cap-and-Cashback. Strong words, indeed. The critics don't seem to have much grasp of the scale of the potential problem; their worries seem nebulous, though strongly (even stridently) expressed.
But from what I can tell, the worries about interstate transfers under about Cap-and-Cashback are vastly overblown: the potential for "unfair" regional results is minor, and very easy to fix.
Special Series
Word on the Street
In a Series
Who Said It? (On dirty energy vs. clean energy)
Talking about "dirty" energy and "clean" energy already sets up a pretty clear dichotomy: dirty = bad; clean = good. (Not to say dirty energy doesn' t have its champions. Drill, baby, drill! wasn't that long ago after all -- and the sentiment certainly hasn't disappeared.)
Recently, somebody took the dirty / clean thing one step further, framing it as a question of good and evil. The idea: dirty fuel comes from below – or hell – and the clean stuff comes from above.
Can you guess WHO SAID THIS?
"Right now, we have a marketplace that is rigged to reward the most filthiest producers, the expensive, 'poisoniest' and destructive fuels from hell, rather than the clean green cheap fuels from heaven."
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