Today’s Calamity: Do We Want a Carbon Footprint Label on Everything We Buy? » The Foundry

Today’s Calamity: Do We Want a Carbon Footprint Label on Everything We Buy? » The Foundry: "If cap and trade passes, businesses could soon face “The Scarlet Letter” treatment. Businesses may have to include a carbon label on their products that tells consumers how much carbon dioxide used in the production process. Cap and trade would raise production costs for businesses—forcing them to include a carbon label on their products is salt in the wound.

Section 274 of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill calls for an Environmental Protection Agency study “to determine the feasibility of establishing a national program for measuring, reporting, publicly disclosing, and labeling products or materials sold in the United States for their carbon content.” The purpose of the study would be to determine “whether a national product carbon disclosure program and labeling program would be effective in achieving the intended goals of achieving greenhouse gas reductions.”

That’s right. Next to your nutrition label, you could see a carbon footprint telling you how much carbon dioxide businesses emitted to make that product. Sounds harmless. Silly, but harmless. But it may be more harmful than imagined—think of the additional costs this would place on businesses."