re: EPA regs to kill nuclear power

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The government's green energy loan program has actually posted a profit for taxpayers. Solyndra was a loser but enough of the loans did well enough we made money. Highlighting Solyndra is selection bias at its best. If you took Warren Buffet's worst investment and ignored everything else he's done he'd look like a moron, too. On the other hand take joe schmo who invests based on what he hear's from Jim Cramer, and his best investment might make him look like a genius.

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SpidermanTUba

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please provide a link (that is not some left wing hack website) to back up your claims

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How does the government determine what the tax should be?

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The same way the government determines what the cap should be in cap-and-trade: they make a best estimate.

Both schemes are arbitrary to the extent that a carbon tax sets the price and lets the market seek the optimal level of emissions, while cap-and-trade sets the optimal level of emissions and lets the market seek the price.

But if there's one thing markets hate more than higher energy prices, it's higher and more volatile energy prices. Plus, most cap-and-trade schemes only address the electricity sector and that's a minority of emissions; you'll need ancillary taxes anyway to address transportation and manufacturing, so why not just combine them? And carbon taxes leave less room for special interests and grandfather clauses which make them toothless. A carbon tax bill can be written in a page or two. You need a whole new regulatory scheme for cap-and-trade, since you're trying to create a new market from scratch.