Still, just as it’s unsurprising when politicians try to take credit for popular actions and deflect blame for unpopular ones, it’s unsurprising when political partisans try to describe the actions of politicians they dislike in negative terms…

How do you figure that? Countries with a carbon tax will still need to protect trade exposed industries in the short term, so the problem of who gets the tax breaks is virtually the same as the free permits problem.

> Permits also make it harder to notice if they actually cut carbon, vs. preserving business as usual.

The ‘cap’ in ‘cap and trade’ makes it dead easy to notice if carbon has actually been cut (illegal emissions aside). That’s the whole point of a cap. Predicting the effect of a centrally fixed carbon price (which is what a tax amounts to more or less) is a much harder problem. You would get the same short term blame dodging with a tax too – start low, forcing future governments to ramp it up in order to meet long term targets.

The Guardian says the US government gets 60%, the Canadian government gets 12.5%, and “unions and bondholders” get the rest.

Reuters says 60% for the US government, 12%-ish for the Canadian government, 17.5% for the UAW, and 10% for bondholders. It also says that the deal had the support of the majority (though a slender majority) of bondholders.

CNN Money (another story) has the same numbers plus some further details: it’s not the UAW as such but a fund for its retired members’ pensions (which to my mind puts quite a different spin on it); the UAW has the right to buy another 2.5% (presumably from the US government), and the bondholders have the right to buy another 15% (ditto).

Are these all disastrously wrong? Or does “give GM to unions at the expense of bondholders” really mean “give 17.5% of GM to provide pensions for retired GM workers at the expense of bondholders, a majority of whom voted for the plan”?

(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not claiming that the GM bankruptcy has been handled wisely or justly or efficiently; I don’t know anything like enough about the situation to have an opinion on that that’s worth reading. But whatever its merits or demerits, it doesn’t look as if your description is within a mile of the truth.)

g, 55% I heard.

Paul, I’ve made my proposal.