IggyPride00;433690 wrote:Cap and trade is dead, and has been for a year now. Just because things pass the House doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day in the Senate. . . . I am going to hope for the amount of money they spend lobbying that the Captains of Industry in this country know better than to use the House of Representatives as a litmus for what is coming down the pike.
I should've been more specific. When I said, "cap-and-trade", I wasn't referring solely to HR 2454, but rather to climate change legislation more broadly. While Waxman-Markey appears to be dead, it's very likely we're going to see some sort of GHG/clean energy law over the next 6-12 months. It may be RES/RPS only, or it may extend/modify ITC/PTC/MTC, or it may be a full-blown emissions trading scheme like we're seeing with the American Power Act. It's tough to say. If nothing happens, it will be done by the EPA pursuant to
Mass v. EPA. One way or another, carbon is going to be regulated and priced, directly or indirectly. The uncertainty that exists is over how, when, and in what shape that will happen. That uncertainty affects the underlying economics of plants so dramatically that the industry is frozen in place, waiting. It's largely why you see major utilities (e.g., Duke) pushing cap-and-trade hard--for regulated utilities, the issue isn't so much the absolute costs (which are passed through to consumers) as much as it is the uncertainty (which affects whether their investments are prudent and thus recoverable from ratepayers, or whether they must be covered by shareholders). The uncertainty of what the Obama administration is doing has frozen massive amounts of investment that otherwise would be happening.
