Cap-and-trade Vs Politics

Ezra Klein: Climate hawks are trying to pinpoint where they went wrong in their campaign to combat global warming. Brad Plumer rather sensibly suggests that they’re overlooking the possibility that the problem wasn’t tactical deficiencies on the part of the green movement, but rather the result of things just not working out on the issue. I think that’s mostly correct, but would add that trying to understand what happened to cap-and-trade by looking specifically at the cap-and-trade debate is almost certainly the wrong way to go about it. Rather, cap-and-trade, like many other issues, is a casualty of larger forces driving our politics.