Today’s Washington Post carries this story by Steve Mufson, “Europe’s Problems Color U.S. Plans to Curb Carbon Gases”. That’s not just a nice title but, for the Post, not a bad take on the matter (you remember last week’s absurd piece touting Europe’s glorious success).
Key take-aways from today’s article are a) the advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitting that “higher electricity prices are ‘the intent of the whole exercise’” and b) WaPo itself admitting that cap-and-trade is “rationing” (see the 2d paragraph, under “US pioneered system”).
Yet despite the piece simply tossing in a line in the penultimate paragraph about the major dispute over whether to auction emission allocations or give them away, in toto, it clearly buttresses objections to freely awarding them instead to well-connected mandarins, a mistake that Europe’s Member States made in buckling to industry pressure resulting in windfall profits when industry passes along the “cost” of these allocations to the electricity consumer, on the grounds that, hey, they could’ve sold them, so simply using up their ration coupons with emissions is a cost.