Virginia Postrel ^[1] voices the same frustration any honest economist feels witnessing the current state of accepted opinion on energy policy:

It’s infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline. The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world, barring a massive buildup of nuclear plants, reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system.

This should be common sense, but environmentalists still believe they can pull a fast one on the American public by including just the right amount of rebates and incentives in legislation to make a cap-and-trade system appear cost free. The latest study from MIT analyzes these scams under the most generous possible assumptions and still finds: ^[2]

• The price of gas increases by 42 percent by 2020.
• The price of electricity increases by 55 percent by 2015.
• Total economic output as measured by GDP drops by about 1 percent by 2035.

And this is assuming a U.S. cap-and-trade system would allow for at least 15 percent  of carbon offsets to be bought from overseas. The inability to properly verify these carbon reductions ^[3] proved to be the Achilles heel of the European Union program, and it guarantees the system will fail. ^[4]