What is cap and trade all about?

Many of you may have heard of cap and trade as a way to reduce heat-trapping gases and slow down climate change. It's one of the issues that are on the table at Copenhagen, and it's also being discussed in the U.S. senate right now.

So what exactly is cap and trade? Well, an entertaining cartoon called "The Story of Cap and Trade" has been making the rounds in emails and blogs that does a fairly good job of laying out the basics of what a cap and trade bill could look like, but it's definitely far from the full story. David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Council has gone into a lot of the details that the cartoon left out and commented on both Paul Krugman's (who won the Nobel Prize in economics and is a columnist at the New York Times) and Jim Hansen's (who is a top climate change scientist at NASA) thoughts on cap and trade. I highly recommend going through these articles and others that are written by experts in the field.

Feel free to add your own thoughts or links to articles on climate change legislation, too!