as have written before, conservative opposition to cap and trade never made any sense. in 2007 the supreme court ordered the EPA to regulate carbon emission. under the clean air act, the EPA really has only one way of doing it, setting a cap on carbon emissions. the bush administration lost that battle before the supreme court and then bush' EPA dragged its feet and stalled issuing the regulations for the last two years of bush's term. it was clear from the start that the new administration wasn't going to stall, but was willing to go the market-based cap-and-trade route rather than an outright ban.
so that's the situation we are in right now. it's a choice between a top-down ban or a cap-and-trade system. there will be a cap; the only question was whether there will also be trade. if we had a rational conservative party in this country, they would throw their support behind cap-and-trade to avoid the top-down ban. after all, cap-and-trade was originally a republican idea for dealing with environmental issues that was adopted by the democrats in the 1990s. but we don't have a rational conservative party in this country. instead of dealing with the real regulate vs. cap-and-trade choice, they pretended that the choice was between cap-and-trade and nothing, and chose nothing. which isn't actually one of the available choices and is probably impossible for them to get.
with cap-and-trade stalled, the obama administration is moving ahead with the cap, as they are legally obligated to do by order of the supreme court. will that be enough to pull conservatives out of the alternate reality they have built themselves around this issue? i suspect not.
