We are in deep shit, but Patrick is right that *effective* cap-and-trade would be more difficult to pass than an *effective* command & control policy. Here is the bottom line: Stuff like offsets, the ability to drive derivatives bubbles, downstream permitting which is more difficult to enforce and so on are not bugs in cap-and-trade. They are features. They are what buy elite support, but also what keeps cap-and-trade from actually delivering emission cuts. Without those features, the limited elite support cap-and-trade has, vanishes. And cap-and-trade has less popular support than command-and-control alternatives in every public opinion poll I've seen. That is CAFE and subsidies for green energy and so on poll much more favorably than cap-and-trade. You are a pretty good poll maven, so you correct me on this factual point if I'm wrong. I know that in 2006 polls show the U.S. public favored higher CAFE stadards 86 to 12. I don't think cap-and-trade has ever come close to that.
Now i know that public opinion is not the main driver for U.S. policy. But when the elite pretty much agrees on not doing what it takes to solve the problem then grassroots organizing is all that is left. In the U.S. elite opinion is divided between doing nothing about the climate crisis, and doing stuff that won't solve the crisis (and will probably make it worse) but will make the financial industry and some large pollutes richer. So how do we build a grassroots movement if we have no current elite buy in to take serious action?
Well I would say that slim as our chances are, there are still greater and lesser evils. Choosing an ineffective and only weakly popular (or maybe unpopular) policy that a portion of the elite support and trying to build a grassroots movement around a fix that will cost that elite supports seems like a worse choice than trying to build a grassroots movement around a policy that is simple to understand, already popular, and would actually be more effective that even a "fixed" cap-and-trade system.
incidentally, I think that the weird mutant offset system that Robin got from Paul Baer and Tom A. would still fail, even in the abstract. To put it in Robins own terms, the process he thinks would lead to offsets working are subject to one of the strongest multi-level principle-agent conflicts I've seen. Also, his detection method only works at the cumulative level, over the sum of all projects. But projects still get approved at the project level.