Why cap and trade resembles self-flagellation

"Ultra-orthodox Jews in heavy beards and heavier black coats pray for hours each day at Jerusalem's Western Wall, even under a sweltering summer sun. Each year, Shiite Muslims whip their backs bloody with chains during the religious holiday of Ashura. Religious vegetarians in Phuket, Thailand, similarly drive knives and skewers through their cheeks.

From an outsider's perspective, religious displays of self-inflicted pain can seem pointlessly barbaric. But many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists believe they have an important function: to facilitate collective action by requiring members to send a costly, hard-to-fake signal of commitment to the group's common creed.

The same impulse, in a rather less impassioned form, seems to animate the Democrats' climate change bill. Coordinating international political action to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions is a collective action problem of grand, global scale. One way to achieve and maintain such coordinated effort is to detect and punish shirkers. (Governments keep money rolling into their treasuries by threatening tax dodgers with jail.) However, there is no world government with the power to bring wayward nations into line, no world-ranging whip to keep countries pulling in time.

This is the glaring flaw in plans for carbon taxes and cap-and-trade regimes: The world's wealthy nations may now be willing to paddle their boat upstream, but if the developing world won't row along with them, if they insist on a free ride, the boat is going nowhere."