So Obama's carefully crafted, exceedingly complex, new Democrat, climate change policy is meeting reality in the form of the Congress and the lobbyists.

The policy, Cap and Trade, was described in an earlier post on this blog. It involves the creation and trading of carbon emission rights. Firms and industries will be assigned a certain quantity of carbon dioxide emissions and they can use these emissions rights in production or sell them to other firms on carbon markets.

The firms that have the rights will want to cut their emissions because they could sell the rights to others instead. The firms that do not have the rights will want to cut emissions rather than buy expensive carbon rights. Hundreds of starving securities traders and financial market types will find employment trading carbon emission rights and various derivatives of the same.

Ultimately the prices of goods that use a lot of fossil fuels will rise and this will discourage consumers from using them so much. Our emissions of carbon dioxide will decrease and this will slow global warming.

In Obama's original proposal emission rights would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would generate revenue for the government and further employment for the financial guys and securities traders.

Which is where Congress and the lobbyists come in.  Jennifer A. Dlouhy from the Hearst newspapers:

Rich Wells, Dow's vice president for energy, told lawmakers that they must carefully design any cap-and-trade program to ensure that U.S. manufacturers are not put at a disadvantage against competitors in countries without similar emissions limits. If lawmakers aren't careful, they "will fail to protect American jobs in the manufacturing sector," Wells told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Tom Conway, the international vice president of the United Steel Workers, said lawmakers must "ensure that the jobs that exist today in energy-intensive industries are not lost," either because U.S. companies move manufacturing operations overseas to less restrictive countries or because the American firms lose business to international competitors.

There is a "critical need to mitigate the competitive disadvantage that will be placed on these industries," Conway said.

Energy-intensive industries that could face higher costs under any cap-and-trade plan include paper mills in the Pacific Northwest, oil refiners in Texas, and Rust Belt steel and chemical companies.

Dow and other manufacturers are asking lawmakers to give away pollution permits to heavily affected industries that rely on fossil fuels for power and for other products - at least when the United States is "in transition" to lower-carbon energy options and other countries haven't imposed similar emissions limits.

That conflicts with President Obama's preference for auctioning all of the allowances, an idea favored by environmental advocates.

The 648-page Waxman-Markey draft bill dodges details on distributing the allowances and how to use any money raised from their sale.

To win support for their legislation, Waxman and Markey will have to find the middle ground between freely distributing allowances and selling the pollution permits. If their legislation ultimately tilts too far in favor of free distribution, they risk alienating environmental advocates.

If the measure requires most of the allowances to be sold, Waxman and Markey are sure to lose support from lawmakers whose districts include hard-hit industries.

"You've got this great tension between the auction system that the president supports and the free allowances system that (industry) supports," said Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

On the energy panel, Democratic Reps. Jay Inslee of Washington and Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania are developing a plan that would give allowances - or allowance rebates - to heavily affected, energy-intensive industries.

And so through the night until even the most well read citizen with some knowledge of the law is hopelessly lost in a sea of drivel and special clauses.

There is a better alternative. Place a tax on the carbon content of all fossil fuels extracted in the United States and all fossil fuel imports. We can start at a low amount - enough to raise the price of gasoline by five cents a gallon - and raise the tax gradually in monthly or yearly increments. The economy can gradually adjust to the change in the cost of carbon emissions and the government gets the revenues.

The ultimate effect is the same. The price of goods whose production creates lots of carbon dioxide increases and we buy less.

This has the further advantage of increasing the price of using gasoline in your car, which probably does not happen with cap and trade.

If we are concerned about placing our domestic producers at a disadvantage we can apply the carbon tax to imported goods based on estimates of the carbon dioxide emitted in the production of these goods.

This is not a protectionist policy since it simply applies the same conditions to foreign producers as are applied to domestic producers.

There are some disadvantages: No additional jobs for securities traders, no long hours of congressional debates and bloviation, nothing to lobby about and less money spent on campaign contributions.

Wonks Anonymous can live with this.