Put simply, Waxman-Markey is a mess. The longer Americans examine the cap-and-trade bill before Congress, the worse it looks. It picks winners and losers. It’s filled with special favors doled out, on the one hand, to rent-seeking corporations who sought competitive edges not through better service to the public but through political favors, and, on the other hand, to politicians whose votes were, quite frankly, for sale.

Will cap and trade even work? The European experience suggests it won’t work. It fails to yield a stable and predictable price for carbon, which is essential if businesses are to make long-term investments relative to it. It hasn’t brought European emissions down.

The Washington Post’s call to switch from cap and trade to a straightforward carbon tax is therefore, so far as it goes, welcome. It makes much better economic sense than cap and trade.

But this isn’t the time for opponents of cap and trade to fold their hands in smug relief and say, “Okay, bring on the carbon tax instead.”

Why not? Because the best reason to oppose cap and trade was not that it was economically inefficient and riddled with pitfalls, but that its purported rationale (lost sight of in the Washington sausage making) was to fight global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Scientific study after study after study after study after study after study has confirmed that carbon dioxide’s effect on global temperature is only about one-sixth that claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (let alone by extremists like Al Gore and James Hansen) and that solar cycles, cosmic cycles, and planetary oceanic and atmospheric cycles, not human emissions of carbon dioxide or any other greenhouse gases, control global climate.

That means we have nothing to fear from carbon dioxide emissions and much to gain from their enhancement of plant growth (and hence crop yields) all over the world. It also means reducing emissions will have no significant effect on future global temperature. Even the 0.09 degree C reduction (itself undetectable and with no biological/ecological effect) calculated from successful implementation of Waxman-Markey must be cut to one-sixth: 0.015 degree C.

Reducing emissions won’t work. It won’t help us. It will hurt us.

Environmental lobbies and others committed to growing government have repeatedly used the tactic of first trying for extreme legislation and then settling for something less extreme—but still a step in the preferred direction. Now is not the time—if it ever was—to cave in to such incrementalism. The problem with CO2 emission reduction legislation isn’t just that it’s extreme. It’s that it’s wrong. It doesn’t just go too far in a good direction. It goes in the wrong direction.