because the driving force behind (successful) business is to keep costs from surpassing revenues.

The whole idea behind legislation like this is the realization that industry (as a whole) will never voluntarily sacrifice profits to protect the environment. Some will, and you'll see them used as examples by those who abhor government regulation. But they're a distinct minority, and we don't have a century to wait for this kind of ethic to grow "stylish". So it has to be incentivised to actually work.

But Cap and Trade is not the way to go. I'll let Chris Dodd explain a better way:

The idea is simple. We already know how much carbon is emitted from the burning of various fossil fuels, and we already collect the data we need to figure out how much to tax each sale of fossil fuels. As such, all that we would need to do to impose a carbon tax is set a price for a ton of carbon. That price would increase over time, leading to decreased carbon emissions as the cost of using dirty fossil fuels overtakes the cost of investing in clean, renewable technologies.

I know ``new taxes'' have been anathema to American politics for years. But a carbon tax eliminates the last incentive there is to pollute because it is cheaper.

A carbon tax would reduce carbon emissions much more efficiently than a cap-and-trade program. The Congressional Budget Office said as much, finding that ``available research suggests that in the near term, the net benefits ..... of a tax could be roughly five times greater than the net benefits of an inflexible cap.

Put another way, a given long-term emission-reduction target could be met by a tax at a fraction of the cost of an inflexible cap-and-trade program.''

Why? Because a tax provides the kind of long-term predictability for the price of emissions a carbon allowance would not. It allows companies to more effectively plan over the long-term how they could most cost-effectively reduce emissions.

Additionally, a carbon tax could be much more easily administered and overseen than a cap-and-trade program because the administrative infrastructure already exists to levy taxes on the upstream sources of fossil fuels, with their carbon contents known quantities as well.

Unlike cap and trade, which would require a complex new administrative structure to oversee and regulate the carbon market, we don't have to start from scratch.

And he gets two blue stars for this:

Lastly, I want to say a word about public transportation which falls within the jurisdiction of the Banking Committee. Given that the transportation sector is responsible for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, clearly we need to direct significant resources toward public transit, which reduces the number of cars on the road.