CHARLES KLEEKAMP and Barbara Hill (“A carbon tax, not a cap and trade,’’ Op-ed, Oct. 18) are half right. A carbon tax would be preferable to a cap-and-trade bill in which lobbyists have insisted on giveaways for 85 percent of the emission allowances.
However, taxes as means to change behavior have three overwhelming disadvantages: They are regressive, hurting poor people more than the rich; they cause inflation, increasing the cost of most of what goes into the cost-of-living index; and they yield huge sums to be used by anyone in government for boondoggles exemplified nowadays as so-called bridges to nowhere.
All three are reversed by applying, instead of taxes, fees, which are defined here as amounts that are returned to citizens. The best way that we have been able to devise is to put all such fees (on fossil fuels and easily measurable pollutant emissions) into a trust fund that is reduced to zero at the end of each month by transferring equal amounts to all legal citizens (say, age 17 and over) and counting these “feebates’’ as negatives in the assessment of the cost-of-living index.
Thus, poor people would get a little richer, illegal immigrants would become poorer, and everyone, rich and poor, individuals and companies, would have increasingly strong incentives to start new businesses and to conserve and to reduce emissions.
David Gordon Wilson
Winchester 
