John Sarbanes Quotes

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate.

Nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax - and it's a great big one.

The market does not work in energy...Carbon has to have a value. Today in the U.S. and China it has no value

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

The cap-and-trade plan is more market driven than anything else. If you want to discourage carbon use, you have to make it more expensive, but what is crucial is that this be a worldwide program that includes China and India.

Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.

Cap and trade is not an easy one for refiners, so we tried to get some moderation in the bill, and we did, but not near as much I would like.

Cap-and-trade is a dangerous policy fraught with the potential for significant corruption, and it would hurt my constituents and our economy by raising energy costs.

Recently though, our State Governments have discussed instigating a carbon trading scheme - the details are still to be decided - and that's an encouraging sign.

Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.

If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.

As is widely accepted, putting a price on carbon pollution is the lowest cost and most efficient way to tackle dangerous climate change.

We hear people talk about putting a price on carbon, but they won't talk about how much that price of carbon is.

I hope the EPA will listen to the many votes over the years in Congress opposing cap-and-trade and rescind that proposed rule.

If someone wants to do a carbon fee and someone else wants to do a cap on emissions or a renewable portfolio standard, we don't start labeling each other as more or less progressive.

Nothing could be more regressive than carbon taxes.

Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.

I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

The reality is the cap-and-trade legislation offered by the Democrats amounts to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill.

Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.

To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous.

Opponents of cap and trade should be careful what they wish for.

A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.