I finally found a way to decide which global-warming policy is best.

Two of the most-discussed solutions are called "cap-and-trade" and "carbon tax". I've been pretty open to both arguments, but haven't been paying that much attention. In fact, I should have realized that the Bush administration supports the cap-and-trade method and since they've been either completely wrong or nearly completely wrong on global warming (they want you to call it "climate change" because that's less scary-sounding), this issue wouldn't be any different. After all, if you want to know what the right thing to do on a global-warming issue is, just do the opposite of whatever President Bush wants to do.

But there are more substantive reasons to support the carbon tax over the cap-and-trade scheme. The two proposals share some serious drawbacks, like the cost of enforcement and overall complexity, so I don't think either is a winner based on those considerations. But there's more to it than those two concerns.

The cap-and-trade idea is that we set a national carbon output target, then assign output caps to existing industries and other carbon dioxide sources (like personal cars) with heavy financial penalties for exceeding them. Any industrial concern that can reduce their output below their assigned cap can sell the remainder of their permitted carbon output to any other business at fair market values, allowing the buyer to exceed their cap without additional penalties. You can see how there is an incentive for industries that can easily reduce their output. They would have a financial incentive to do that and sell their remaining carbon credits.

Generally, these sorts of caps work pretty well, cutting local pollution effectively. The problem is, now you have solved your contribution to the carbon problem, but you haven't stopped China, India, Indonesia, or any other country from doing whatever they want, pollution-wise, unless they agree to this same scheme. That doesn't seem likely. So once the USA and the European Union put these caps in place, industries that can't afford the carbon regulations will simply move to countries that don't impose caps and the carbon-cap countries not only lose jobs and industries, the global carbon output doesn't just go down, the transportation component goes up! Suddenly, you have to ship all those goods a lot farther from Shanghai to Chicago on top of this, so the wealthy countries that cap their carbon effectively just export more of their dirty industries. This has already happened with other industries.

That's where the carbon tax is more effective. It doesn't care where the good was made, it only asks how efficient, carbon-wise, is the company that made it? That way, we not only stop the practice of exporting our industry to less-regulated economies, we stop exporting our pollution, too. It wouldn't matter if China didn't sign on to carbon caps, we would evaluate thier export industries and tax their goods accordingly. With this tax, cleaner US and EU goods would be competitive based on the relatively low tax they would presumably pay (not to mention a lower transport penalty) while at the same time, encouraging industries in nations that don't participate in the program to clean up their acts in order to compete in the lucrative export markets of the West.

The drawbacks for the carbon tax are that you are now asserting a form of regulatory authority over a foreign industry, which gets into difficult sovereignty issues; but we've already crossed that line by demanding that foreign goods meet minimum safety standards (Volkswagen, Ford, and Toyota already meet those rules to export to the USA and Europe). And you will find that your left-wing friends complain that we're forcing poor people in Farawayistan to pay for your miserable life of excess (and that you should wear scratchy hemp clothing, too).

I'm very much worried that without regulatory action in the United States, our industries will not be forced to innovate and be left behind when the world wakes up to the serious problem facing us. A tax program like the carbon tax would not only level the playing field for our industries, it would encourage the innovations in the field that we could then sell to businesses in other nations. All that, plus it might protect a few domestic jobs. Can the cap-and-trade idea do that?

CDs listened to today:

• Craig David: Born To Do It
• Kevin Puts: Dark Vigil
• Marc Blitzstein: Airborne Symphony
• Sarah Harmer: You Were Here
• Konono No. 1: Congotronics
• Henry Cowell: American Melting Pot
• Little Feat: Hoy Hoy!