Cap and Trade’s Inevitable Central Planning Conclusion

Conn Carroll /

Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report confirming what anyone who knows anything about how markets actually work already knew: the European Union’s cap and trade policy has been a complete failure. According to the report the “price on carbon emissions fluctuated” making the system’s “cumulative effect on emissions across the EU member states … uncertain.”

Well Britain’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband knows exactly what to do about those fluctuations. The London Times reports:

[Miliband] appeared to be on a collision course with Britain’s big power companies last night as he called for sweeping reforms to the industry, including greater state control and a retreat from the free market orthodoxy of the past two decades.
…
He said that the Government needed to take a more interventionist approach in the setting of higher carbon prices to “overcome market failures” that were inhibiting the adoption of renewable energy technologies.

Cap and trade will always lead to market failure. New Zealand Climate Science Coalition chair Bryan Leyland explains why:

So, to my knowledge, carbon trading is the only commodity trading where it is impossible to establish with reasonable accuracy how much is being bought and sold, where the commodity that is traded is invisible and can perform no useful purpose for the purchaser, and where both parties benefit if the quantities traded have been exaggerated. … It is, therefore, an open invitation to fraud and that is exactly what is happening all over the world.

So after cap and trade inevitably fails to produce a reliable price on carbon here in the United States, we can inevitably expect the Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s of the world to begin echoing Milibrand’s calls for “greater state control” and “a more interventionist approach in the setting of higher carbon prices.”

The left is already about to nationalize the auto industry and if they implement cap and trade the entire energy sector will not be far behind.