I was skimming articles on Real Clear Politics and saw a couple talking about the monster issue conservative talk radio was sounding the alarms about during the 2008 election: Cap And Trade.

What is ``Cap and Trade,'' exactly? Well, at it's most basic level, it's a tax on companies that produce carbon dioxide emissions. At a closer level, it is a system by which companies, industries, and even states and countries purchase and carbon credits on an open market. But, in the end, it's a tax, because when everything is said and done, the revenue generated by cap and trade transactions goes to... well, nobody really talks about where it goes, but it goes to some government account.

There's an obvious similarity between cap and trade and the SCHIP legislation recently signed by President Obama: the government maneuvers itself into a situation where it is actually encouraging the bad behavior it was supposedly trying to discourage.

In the case of SCHIP, the legislation signed calls for a large tax increase on cigarette and other tobacco product purchases. The rationale here is that the increased fee will create a burden on those in society that purchase these unhealthy products and, therefore, will encourage them to stop engaging in behavior like smoking. The money collected from these taxes is funnelled into programs to guarantee health insurance for children.

If you haven't figured it out already, while legislators called this tax increase a penalty on smokers that should decrease the number of smokers, they actually want more smokers in order to fund SCHIP!

It's will be just the same with cap and trade legislation. Replace a person smoking cigarettes with a company that produces carbon dioxide emissions as part of their operations and you've got the same thing. The money collected from this scheme will be funnelled to some program or group of programs that are then dependent upon companies doing something government really does not want them to do.

The conflict of interest here is interesting, but to muddy the waters more, it seems apparent, to me anyway, that the urgency of addressing carbon dioxide emissions is still far from settled.

In one article I read, 10 Ways To Trade Up by Kevin Drum with Mother Jones, Drum compares cap and trade ideas to the 1970 Clean Air Act and uses it as a proof of cap and trade's inevitable success.

>We found out in 1990, when the Clean Air Act was modified to address acid rain pollution caused by sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Instead of requiring every plant to install a specific cleanup technology or meet a specific emission rate, the epa simply set a nationwide cap on the total volume of SO² emissions and required power plants to own a permit for each ton of SO² they emitted. Each plant was allocated a certain number of permits, and if a plant reduced its emissions to the point where it didn't need all its permits, it could sell them to the highest bidder.

The problem I have with this comparison is the ``well, duh!'' assumption that there's nothing wrong with comparing carbon dioxide to sulfur dioxide. They're both bad for the environment, one might say.

The problem is that sulfur dioxide is a poisonous gas that can be used to produce sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide has been well documented to cause a wide variety of health issues in humans and animals. Carbon dioxide, not so much. In fact, carbon dioxide has been shown, time and time again, to improve the production of plant life and has little or no effect on humans.

It should also be mentioned here that carbon dioxide accounts for anywhere from one tenth of a percent to one percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (the evil, nasty water vapor being the largest constituent of these insidious chemicals bent on destroying life on earth.)

The global warming alarmists claim rising carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere are to blame for seemingly corresponding rising global temperatures. This is intriguing until you match up temperature fluctuations on Earth with temperatures on other planets in our solar system and match that to solar energy output from our sun.

As silly as it may seem to create an ellaborate trading market (to veil a taxation scheme) to plunder companies for generating a mostly harmless gas into the atmosphere, it's very likely it will happen. President Obama has been consistent in statements about environmental policy and the ``rightful place'' of science.

Drum writes, ``The backbone of (President Obama's) climate policy is actually an ambitious program (Cap and Trade) that, if done right, will reduce greenhouse gases and raise desperately needed revenue--and, most important of all, has a fighting chance of making it through the congressional sausage factory in one piece.''

The country and the world seem to be slowly waking up, however. Most of the online comments to the Mother Jones article seem to be indicative of this as most of them decry global warming alarmism and question the logistics of cap and trade legislation.