A junior senator from Washington state, Maria Cantwell, is is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend.”
Although, like in cap-and-trade, carbon credits are auctioned off and traded, which results in an increase in cost for products made with energy (which is to say, just about everything), under this interesting twist on the old idea, American taxpayers are issued payments from the government as compensation. To quote this article in the Economist, which calls the idea “honest” for its transparency and simplicity (the bill is a mere 40 pages long), “To discourage the use of dirty energy, [the bill] says, it has to be more expensive. To make up for that, here’s a thousand bucks.” This way there is an inherent consumer-driven incentive to purchase less energy-intensive goods, which would translate to an incentive to produce them on the industrial scale. Here is a link to Senator Cantwell's page in which The Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act is introduced.
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