1) The revenue would go to states, not to JP Morgan Securities and to polluters. This revenue could be used to reduce, say, income taxes and/or deficits.

2) Carbon emission credits actually amount to paying money to corporations precisely because they have been polluting in the past. They make money by reducing such pollution — even if they still pollute quite a bit — while companies which have never polluted do not get this windfall.

We as government, as citizens, and as consumers need to do whatever we can to rein in the single-mindedness of corporations’ focus on the bottom line, so maybe this is a first step. (An excellent movie on this theme is the recent documentary “The Corporation.”)

Personally, if Joe believes in what he has written in his book “Hell and High Water,” I think it would be good to shift the center of gravity on this blog to a debate over the need for immediate, pronounced action versus settling for more gradual, voluntary, and localized government action. This is the question on the minds of people now becoming increasingly tuned into climate crisis issues. Instead, we’ve allowed the Deniers to do here what they’ve done in the mass media (in the name of “balance”) by having us wasting time debating whether the problem even exists, and all sorts of scientific nuances that no one cares about.