Cap and trade policies would disrupt lives

CAP and TRADE is not a good enough idea to justify increasing human misery among citizens in coal producing states with a huge new tax during this economic recession. Fox News estimates that the CAP & TRADE tax policy would cost taxpayers from 1.3 to 1.9 trillion dollars over an 8 year period starting in 2012.This is a huge tax on energy that the administration is trying to ram quickly through Congress without a full discussion in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

CAP and TRADE Energy tax was originally described as a mechanism for funding non-GHG producing energy to replace America's Greenhouse Gas generating fossil fuel (Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas). The legislation has evolved in deliberations in Congress and in its current form has become just another LARGE energy tax that produces general revenue for the government which can be directed to any purpose Congress and the Executive designate.

Substantially raising the cost of energy for most Americans will put in jeprody the economic recovery. It does not make sense to add huge new taxes at a time of serious economic recession if you are hoping for an economic recovery.

Jsham's argument that public policy should be made without regard for the effects of policy upon people clearly shows the type of elitist attitude that has crippled this country economically and socially.
You talk about "tough trade-offs" being necessary for the creation of public policy, yet you ignore the fact that Raney is asking for dialogue. He is asking for consideration of the 50,000 West Virginia families (not to mention those in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee) whose livelihoods depend on mining coal to give up those jobs. Yet you provide no alternative.
Just to place it in perspective there are counties in West Virginia that derive more than 90 percent of their budgets from coal revenues -- 90 percent!
You can deny it and argue that those jobs can be shifted to underground mining, but if you were being honest you would acknowledge that your ultimate goal is the end of the use of fossil fuels.
You are also asking that poor and middle class America absorb a doubling, tripling or even quadrupling of our electric bills on the basis of unproven science.
What arrogance!
Raney is asking for an open dialogue, bringing all the players and stakeholders together at the table to develop a policy that isn't overly punitive to any group. Is that too much to ask?

I am of course sympathetic to the aspirations of families in West Virginia. (Indeed, that's why I am collaborating with many leaders down there myself - check out http://www.appvoices.org/) But Mr. Raney claims that if a policy has a negative effect on a small group of people, then it must be 'wrong.' This argument makes no sense: all public policies involve tough trade-offs.

For if we followed Raney's dictum to the letter, we would have no public policy. For example, certainly the Highway Act, the TVA, the Apollo program - indeed, even the abolition of slavery, to illustrate the absurdity of the premise - had a negative effect on at least one person. Does that mean that, ipso facto, they should not have been pursued?

Of course not. The pursuit of a clean-energy future demands that we promote fairness and protect the most possible opportunities and aspirations for the most possible people, now and in the future, including the good families of West Virginia and elsewhere in coal country (again, see http://www.appvoices.org/.) The dialogue - which Planet Forward can contribute to - must be about how to do that best; there can be no dialogue at all if we follow Mr. Raney's premise.