Phil Gramm Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A cap and trade system would put some kind of price on the carbon footprint.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Nothing could be more regressive than carbon taxes.

I do not believe we can effectively move Australia to a lower emission economy, which is what we need to do if we're going to make a contribution to a global reduction in greenhouse gases, without putting a price on carbon.

When you look at the social cost of carbon - and there is a lot of ambiguity around that - what you also need to be doing is looking at the benefits of carbon and what that has on increased agriculture production.

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.

We need to fashion policies with proper incentives to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.

Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.

Society has to get a grip and put a tax on carbon. Of course, there is much that flows from that, and it is a complex situation. The small details of something such as climate change are political and social, and they are a lot about fairness and how we rebalance towards a fairer society.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.

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.

Well, I'm not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.