Grook: Cap-and-Trade Con
They call it green,
but it smells of tax,
a maze of rules,
and bureaucrat stacks.
Costs roll downhill,
families pay twice,
the climate unchanged—
but the grift runs nice.
The Cap-and-Trade Con, Part II: The Inefficiency Racket
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
Cap-and-trade sounds like a climate policy. In reality, it’s a backdoor tax scheme designed to funnel billions into state coffers without ever asking voters to approve a “tax increase.” It’s government racketeering with a green paint job.
Here’s how it works. Businesses don’t pay taxes directly. Instead, they bid for carbon “allowances” at state-run auctions. Those allowances are nothing more than permission slips to keep doing what was legal yesterday—running a refinery, generating electricity, trucking goods across the state. Sacramento invents the scarcity, auctions off the hall passes, and calls it climate leadership.
But businesses don’t actually eat those costs. They pass them along—in utility bills, at the pump, and in higher prices on everything that moves through California’s economy. If you live in California, Washington, New York, or another deep-blue cap-and-trade state, you’re already paying the bill every time you open your electric statement or swipe at the gas station.
The numbers don’t lie.
California alone has hauled in $32 billion since its program began.
Washington, just two years in, has already raked in $3 billion.
The Northeast’s RGGI compact has piled up nearly $10 billion, with New York pocketing over $2.5 billion.
This isn’t a climate plan. It’s a revenue stream. And like every “indirect” tax, it’s regressive: the people least able to afford skyrocketing bills feel it most.
The Inefficiency Racket
There’s another irony nobody talks about: how inefficient this “indirect tax” really is. A straight-up income tax hike would at least be simple. You collect, you spend, done. But that’s politically toxic—nobody wants to stand at a podium and say, “We raised your taxes.” So instead we get this elaborate cap-and-trade charade.
It takes armies of people to keep the racket spinning. Assessors to set emissions caps. Bureaucrats to draft new regulations. Lawyers and accountants to help companies stay “compliant.” Enforcers to levy fines. Agencies to oversee redistribution programs. Even more legislators to write new rules for where the money should flow. Every dollar raised carries an invisible surcharge of administrative waste, all so politicians can pretend they never raised taxes at all.
And then there’s the hardware. Companies are forced to buy new monitoring equipment, install updated reporting systems, and submit to endless rounds of “verification.” That means a whole new class of hired “experts”—consultants, auditors, and engineers—whose job is to measure, certify, and certify again that emissions are being properly tracked. None of this actually reduces a single molecule of carbon; it just creates a new industry of compliance.
Pile on top the quiet money that always seeps through: lobbying to water down certain rules, “consulting fees” to smooth approvals, and outright political contributions to make sure the results come out “right.” The whole thing starts to look less like climate policy and more like a jobs program for bureaucrats, accountants, and influence-peddlers.
That makes cap-and-trade not just coercive, but inefficient by design—like forcing every business and household to buy tickets to a Broadway show that never ends, just so Sacramento can pretend it’s theater instead of theft.
And here’s the scam: when families can’t pay those inflated utility bills, the state steps in with “assistance.” A huge slice of the cap-and-trade haul gets redirected into subsidies for the very groups politicians most want to court—low-income residents, activist nonprofits, and yes, illegals who are covered under state benefit programs. The “haves” pay inflated energy prices; the state collects the skim; and then redistributes the money to the “have-nots.” It’s Marxism in motion, dressed up as market innovation.
Think about that circle:
Sacramento invents a new burden.
Businesses pass it to you in higher bills.
You pay up—or need help.
The state cuts a check to its favored groups using the money it collected from you in Step 2.
That’s not climate policy. That’s a closed-loop racket.
And nobody wears the face of this scam better than Gavin Newsom, grinning on the cover of Vanity Fair while California bleeds residents, shuts down refineries, and charges $6 at the pump. He’s the milk-carton kid of cap-and-trade: slick smile on the front, hollow inside, built to sell.
It’s no accident that the biggest revenue haulers—California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts—also lead the nation in population outflow. When the bill keeps climbing and the lights don’t stay on, people move. It’s foot voting, and it tells the truth faster than any press release.
Cap-and-trade was sold as climate virtue. What Gavin actually built is the most bloated, inefficient tax collection system in American history. It wastes billions on paperwork, armies of regulators, and mandatory consultants, while forcing families to pay twice—once on their bills, and again in subsidies for those who can’t pay.
And the result? Californians are voting with their feet. Businesses are leaving, U-Hauls are lined up, and the state bleeds people faster than it can count “offsets.” For every household that escapes, a little more of Gavin’s utopia collapses under its own weight.
That’s the real audit of cap-and-trade. Not a ledger in Sacramento, but the steady stream of Californians fleeing the shakedown. And when the smoke clears, Gavin Newsom won’t be remembered as a climate savior. He’ll be remembered as the smiling salesman of the biggest green grift in American history.