okay, since i am on a roll with non-mainstream stuff today, i have an actual supportive reason why cap and trade may have a positive effect on my favorite area of interest, which is growing and maintaining forests as a carbon sinks.
if private landowners can sell carbon credits to carbon emitters and keep acreages in a forested state, there will be the side benefit of protecting millions of acres of habitat for critters that will need the core prime habitats as the fringes of their ranges are chewed up by climate change.
Getting a check from Monsanto to NOT log a parcel of ground would be most satisfying. (i own timberland in idaho, which is old-growth and is not going to be logged anyway) The repubs would say this will be passed onto the consumer as an ancillary tax from Monsanto, for instance. But it might mean that Monsanto finds ways to avoid paying by making their operations less impactive.
The price of electricity would certainly be affected, but again, most people have many easy ways to reduce their consumption without lifestyle impacts.
Sort of like the CRP progam (the soil bank program) that turned millions of marginal acres back to nature and caused the most incredible surge in biodiversity that the plains ever saw since the loss of the buffalo.... A basically unintended consequence of the Obama cap and trade could be the turning of millions of acres of private land into the hands of wildlife.
Not that logging is bad, mind you, but changing the dynamic of what and where is logged and why could help heal a lot of ground. Thinning for biomass, so that the residual trees can grow freely to mature size and with lower risk from fire, and using the thinnings to make electricity in a carbon-neutral manner... is a process that is happening now, and should be advocated. (fast-growing trees store more new carbon than stagnant stands, and store more than the carbon released in modern, efficient cogeneration plants versus losses to incomplete combustion in wildfires)
(note of admission: i sell 100,000 tons of biomass per year, enough to power a city of 50,000 and do it with the tacit support of the environmental community, as it is done to stabilize high hazard fire situations near the wildland urban interface and never involves old-growth timber)
so there, my mea culpa as a silviculturist/forester, my day job, which is far from where my mind goes as a gag writer.
