PIGOU IS WAY TOO HONEST FOR THE LEFT:

That First Step is a Doozy: The Obama administration is finding that greenhouse gas control is hard in practice, especially the very first step. (Kenneth P. Green Sunday, March 22, 2009, The American)

[R]eductions could be achieved in a number of ways. One could use regulation, as the EPA is preparing to do, requiring energy users to increase their efficiency. But regulations can only nibble around the edges of the issue, and it is well known that regulations are costly, economically damaging, and prone to creating perverse consequences.

Alternately, one could slap a tax on the carbon content of fuels and let the market sort out how it wants to cut emissions in order to avoid the tax. That is the approach that most economists (and policy wonks such as myself) agree would be the most efficient. Environmentalists dislike the tax for several reasons. They think it is politically unsalable and will not guarantee a given certain level of reductions: those stubborn energy-using humans might simply opt to pay the tax and keep emitting. Even worse, taxes are entirely too transparent. Environmentalists do not want people to see the cost of greenhouse gas mitigation too clearly, because the public might reject it as too costly.

Finally, one could use a mechanism called emission trading, or “cap and trade,” which ostensibly harnesses the power of the market to find least-cost emission reduction approaches and allows a great deal of obfuscation and special-interest politics into the process. This is the favored approach of environmentalists, the Democratic leadership, and President Obama. But the administration is already stumbling at the very first step, which suggests that it should take a deep breath and think things through.