“At the end of the day,” Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail statement, “the advisers will be charged with implementing President-elect Obama’s strong targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050. However, the president-elect appointed a cabinet with diverse views and looks forward to strong debate within the cabinet on how best to achieve those outcomes.”

 

At least for the present, then, the idea of a carbon tax has been shelved, and Mr. Obama’s economic and environmental advisers are working, along with Congress, to devise a cap-and-trade system.

 

According to a transition official familiar with Mr. Summers’s thinking, he is wary of moving very quickly on a carbon cap, because doing so could raise energy costs, kill jobs and deepen the current recession. He foresees a phase-in of several years for any carbon restraint regime, particularly if the economy continues to be sluggish, a slower timetable than many lawmakers and environmentalists are pressing.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/washington/03enviro.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

As Mr. Obama seeks to find the right balance between his environmental goals and his plans to revive the economy, he may have to resolve conflicting views among some of his top advisers.

While Mr. Summers’s thinking on climate change has evolved over the last decade, his views on the potential risks to the economy of an aggressive effort to limit carbon emissions have not. But he now works for a president-elect who has set ambitious goals for addressing global warming through a government-run cap-and-trade system.