Cap-and-trade is a policy approach to controlling carbon emissions that surfaces in several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, generally in the context of broader discussions about environmental regulation, government intervention, and market mechanisms. Guests and callers addressed the topic from differing libertarian perspectives, with some opposing it as a tax on economic activity and others describing it as a market-friendly alternative to centralized planning.
Gary Johnson’s opposition
In a 2011 episode, Gary Johnson stated his opposition to cap-and-trade legislation directly. Speaking with Bob Zadek about environmental policy, Johnson said that government intervention to tax carbon emissions would raise a great deal of money at a cost to taxpayers while making no difference to the environment. He framed his opposition within a broader argument that good economies lead to clean environments, and that carbon emissions would decline over time without government mandates. Johnson also criticized ethanol subsidies and farm subsidies in the same exchange, arguing that ethanol takes more energy to produce than it produces and advocating that farm subsidies be cut by 43 percent. Bob Zadek characterized the broader pattern of government subsidies and dietary guidance as the Nanny State writ large, and Johnson agreed that government should provide information—such as calorie guidelines and cigarette warnings—without banning products like cupcakes. The cap-and-trade discussion in this episode was brief and served as one example among several of government intervention that Johnson opposed Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
Cap-and-trade revenue and California high-speed rail
A 2018 episode with Judge Quentin Kopp examined California’s high-speed rail project and identified cap-and-trade as a funding source. Kopp explained that the estimated cost of the Madera-to-Wasco segment had risen from about $6.5 billion to approximately $10.7 billion, and that the money was coming from Governor Brown’s cap-and-trade legislation and the revenue accumulated under that program. Kopp stated that about $600 million a year had been delivered to high-speed rail from cap-and-trade revenue. He also described the broader financing history of the project, including a November 2008 bond issue of $9 billion, of which about $7 billion had been spent, and noted that the House of Representatives had twice since 2010 passed legislation prohibiting federal funds for California High-Speed Rail. The episode’s treatment of cap-and-trade was as a revenue mechanism rather than as an environmental policy in itself, and Kopp’s criticism focused on the project’s cost overruns and constitutional violations rather than on cap-and-trade as a concept Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018).
Cap-and-trade as a market mechanism
In a 2019 episode, Mark Joffe offered a different framing. Responding to a caller’s question about the difference in cost between the green marketplace and the Green New Deal, Joffe described cap-and-trade and carbon taxes as tools government could use to guide behavior toward greener approaches without heavy-handed top-down centralized planning. He noted that California’s high taxes and regulations were driving out-migration to states like Texas and Arizona. Later in the same episode, Joffe elaborated that carbon taxes and cap-and-trade could work if emissions were priced correctly, but that determining the appropriate level of taxation was very challenging because of debate over how much damage each metric ton of CO2 causes. He observed that there was a lot of religion and not as much science as one might like in the climate change debate. Bob Zadek responded by arguing that the complexity of the cost-benefit analysis meant government should not make decisions on the basis of speculation and superstition, and that government should not force people to behave in certain ways without proving its case Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Across episodes
The topic appears in three episodes across eight years, and the treatment shifts in emphasis rather than in underlying argument. Gary Johnson in 2011 opposed cap-and-trade legislation as a costly tax with no environmental benefit. Judge Quentin Kopp in 2018 discussed cap-and-trade as a revenue source for high-speed rail without evaluating it as environmental policy. Mark Joffe in 2019 described cap-and-trade as a potentially market-friendly mechanism for pricing emissions, while acknowledging the difficulty of setting the correct price. The excerpts show no direct exchange between these positions and no development of a shared argument across the episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the name of any cap-and-trade bill, the year any cap-and-trade program was enacted, or the mechanics of how allowances are allocated or traded. They do not provide the total revenue California’s cap-and-trade program generates beyond the figure Kopp cites for high-speed rail, nor do they describe any legal challenge to cap-and-trade itself. The sources do not include any guest who defended cap-and-trade as an environmental policy on its merits, nor any discussion of its measured effect on emissions.