I’ll look it over…this Ed guy sounds emotional to me…..not my style dealing with choatic leadership!

Opposition to “cap-and-trade” legislation to reduce global warming pollution is a common refrain among many Republican and a few Democratic officials this fall. The program is derided as a “cap and tax” that would drain voters’ wallets while bankrupting the nation. But ironically enough, the three most recent Republican presidents promoted cap and trade, including Ronald Reagan. They employed such a system to phase out lead in gasoline, cut chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and reduce sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain—all without undue cost. Officials who are criticizing it now are doing so for political purposes, and they could likely make it harder to employ cost-effective, market-based policies in the future to significantly lower pollution at an affordable cost.
For instance, the “Pledge to America: the 2010 Republican Agenda” promises to “oppose attempts to impose a national ‘cap and trade’ energy tax.” After the demise of comprehensive global warming legislation in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gloated that “cap-and-trade, which is also known as the national energy tax, is dead in the United States Senate.”
Yet many Republican officials greatly admire the father of cap and trade: President Ronald Reagan. Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) praised Reagan last year:
When you realize the magnitude of President Reagan’s achievements, there is absolutely no reason why anyone would ignore his ‘demonstrably good’ example.
Nonetheless, she opposes a global warming plan that would employ the innovative cap-and-trade system first created by President Reagan. Like Palin, many of today’s public officials are repudiating Reagan’s legacy of cap and trade for cheap political gain and to curry favor with the polluting industries that are supporting attacks on those who voted for a cap-and-trade market mechanism to reduce global warming pollution.
A little history is in order. Cap and trade was developed as a more flexible, market-based system to reduce environmental pollution compared to the so-called “command and control” model employed by environmental laws in the 1970s. The old system required each polluting facility to make a fixed reduction in air or water contamination, which ignored that some facilities could cut pollution more cheaply than others.
Cap and trade is a cost-effective alternative that allows the firms that can more cheaply reduce their emissions below their required limit to sell any additional reductions to companies that are not able to make reductions as easily. This creates a system that guarantees a set level of overall reductions while rewarding the most efficient companies and ensuring that the cap can be met at the lowest possible cost to the economy.
The Reagan White House conceived the first cap-and-trade program to reduce pollution. It was used in the 1980s to phase out lead in gasoline at a lower cost. An EPA analysis shows:
…estimated savings from the lead trading program of approximately 20 percent over alternative programs that did not provide for lead banking, a cost savings of about $250 million per year.
President Reagan also signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to slash the production and use of chemicals that deplete the upper ozone layer essential to screen out cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. His administration established a cap-and-trade system to implement the chemical reductions the protocol required. A 2006 scientific assessment concluded that “the Montreal Protocol is working” to reduce chemicals and protect the ozone layer.