Cap-and-Trade a Net Negative on Jobs? Is That Important?
I am still fairly open-minded on the issue of cap-and-trade, leaning toward favoring it. From an environmental perspective, it seems like a good approach, though the results of early EU experiments seem mixed at best. But I've never considered the question of what, if any, effect of a cap-and-trade policy would have on employment. This piece on one of my favorite sites, FactCheck.org, concludes that it could have a slightly negative effect on employment figures over the course of a decade. While that seems like a fairly negligible consideration, I recognize how easy it is to draw my conclusion if you don't have to worry about having or keeping a job. Is this really another case of the old false trade-off between environmental protection and job loss? Or is there something deeper, perhaps more interesting going on here?
