EPA Issues Its GHG NSPS: Cap And Trade Never Looked So Good

On Tuesday, EPA announced release of its proposed New Source Performance Standards for carbon pollution from new power plants. I'm feeling like a broken record here. Everyone's acting on rational motives (if not rationally), but the result remains, to put it mildly, suboptimal. On the paramount environmental issue of the day, we're going about it all wrong, when we know that there is a better way.

I cannot really blame EPA or the environmentalists. Indeed, at a certain level they cannot be faulted unless you don't believe in climate change, and I am not in that camp. Since climate change is real, they have to do something. In fact, as they have pointed out in the recent arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, they have statutory obligations to act – but they haven't been given the right tools.