For weeks now I have had an issue of The Economist open on my desk at home with a bunch of notes wri

For weeks now I have had an issue of The Economist open on my desk at home with a bunch of notes written on the paper version of this editorial about The Green New Deal. There's a number of things I want to say about it, but I just never seem to get to it.

So let me just say this, which is the main thing.

Carbon offsets would be a very fine idea if not for politics.

Quick refresher: the idea of carbon offsetting is that every company that produces carbon emissions would get some kind of emission allowance for total pollution, the sum total of which would be a net reduction in national emissions. Polluters could then trade emissions allotments so that the companies that could reduce the least expensively would reduce the most, paid for by the companies for whom reducing is expensive.

Fine.

If only it were so simple. There is a minor problem and a major one.

The minor problem: companies would lie and cheat about how much they polluted and regulators wouldn't be staffed well enough to catch them cheating or to enforce the rules when they did so.

The major problem: carbon credits would create a new industry that would want to persist whether global warming gets fixed or not. The more credits those entrepreneurs had to trade the more fees they would get, so there would be political pressure to push the total allotment up (whatever it did for global warming).

And to be honest there'd be a third problem. The ways in which companies would game the system would ultimately prove vastly more complicated than the two examples above and it would be a real mess to sort out but it would all add up to the same thing: undermining the goal of stopping climate change.

In a pure, pure world where all the variables stayed put and everyone followed the rules, I would agree that carbon emission taxes would be a great solution for much of the world's global warming pollution, but the world isn't that simple and markets aren't magic. They are insidious.

Though to be crystal clear, I would definitely support virtually any carbon offsetting measure proposed by anyone that did much of anything at all. But still. I also think the Green New Deal is realistic in a way free market true believers willfully ignore.