Thanks for taking the time to parse this issue and do a very fair job of it, too.

Grandfathering amounts to handing over remaining public environmental rights to interests that have been stealing and swindling them all along.  There is no widely accepted doctrine that says if you can poison or deprive the resources of others you are free to do so if you can make a buck while you are at it, but that is pretty much what big polluters have argued.  Grandfathering such practices is just the final surrender in the battle over this unjust practice.

I like the cap and auction model, so long as we set caps low enough to actually reduce carbon emissions in line with the drastic measures the latest climate destabilization models indicate are necessary to have a prayer of providing our children and grandchildren with a planet and an economy that isn't terrifying.  So far, there is very little realism in that regard among those who are happily grandfathering in rights to effectively continue to make things worse and worse with each passing year.

When I read cap and grandfather, I thought it was just gonna be a matter of.

Only new generating capacity would be considered as "in the game".

And for instance, if a new facility were to increase it's output, that increased output would be "in the game", where as the historical output would be "out of the game".

Assuming the "starting date" were slightly retroactive, or atleast very prompt, that framework might work.

_

But yes, it would be a lot less severe than having all existing capacity "in the game".

I found this very helpful personally, Tom, and bringing some rigor to definitions is very important.

The underlaying difficulty with the cap and trade/carbon tax discussion, is that we continue to put the cart before the horse.
No policy now under consideration comes close to doing the job that is required. The only justification for Kyoto, cap & trade,  all the proposals being considered by the US Senate and any other climate policy which has even a slight possibility of being adopted, is as "first steps" toward some future when the world will get serious.

The world is at that point now, however, and there is no time to take "first steps." Cap & trade in any present form is worthless and should only be discussed if its advocates at ED and Pew define workable terms. They can't do this because it would deep-six any chance to win something. But something rather nothing is deadly.

This shouldn't be tough to recognize. Every advocate, from ED and Pew on down, has acknowledged that standards will have to be tightened down the road, presumably when things have gotten bad enough to strengthen our hand.

To image that cap and trade (in any of the variations Tom neatly defines) will solve climate change simply because it is good policy is lunacy.   We have only to look at the US experience with 1970's federal environmental law. The Clean Water Act, for those old enough to remember, ended surface water pollution in America - probably the only US environmental mandate as emphatic as global climate action must be now. Once out of the political and policy arena, polluting industries were able to sabotage implementation and, eventually, dumb down its goals.

No policy that imposes hefty costs on BP, Exxon-Mobil, et. al. is going to work unless there is sufficient power to force compliance. That's the horse we need to be worrying about. If we had (or could see how to gain) the leverage necessary to implement an effective cap & trade - if and when government is  powerful enough to force total restructuring of global energy systems - then some other, quicker and more certain policy than cap & trade will be chosen to do the job.

Ken Ward ken[at]brightlines.org

Well a simple hurdle to keep things on track

Stop building coal power plants, unless you can prove they can sequester the carbon.

Get plugin hybrids on the road.  (Ideally series plugins)