It looks like US politicians are more and more firmly wedded to a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon, rejecting a national carbon tax. This despite evidence that Europe's cap-and-trade system is complicated and ineffective, and that cap-and-trade will still amount to a tax on consumers in the form of higher energy prices.

IHT: " [President] Obama and Democratic leaders argue that cap-and-trade, in which polluters must either reduce emissions on their own or buy credits from more-efficient companies, is a better system for assuring reductions, letting the market set the right to pollute.

But the main reason most in Washington recoil from a carbon tax is political: few are willing to openly advocate billions of dollars in new taxes at a time of economic distress, even though a cap-and-trade program also means higher energy prices.

Many congressional Democrats were around in 1993 when President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed an energy tax and then abandoned it after it failed to generate any Republican support. Some noticed last fall when the Liberal Party in Canada suffered its worst loss ever running on a platform that included a national energy tax."

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