Today’s Financial Times says what everyone already should know about the fate of cap and trade under Obama:

it seems clear that some things, most notably any serious steps to tackle global warming and sharp increases in long-term public investment, will have to be postponed for at least a year and possibly much longer.

For “cap and trade”, the writing was already on the wall last October when the Senate voted heavily against the relatively modest Lieberman-Warner bill to control emissions. A few months earlier and it could well have passed.

Given the short-term contractionary effects of imposing an indirect tax on carbon, it will now almost certainly be shelved.