SmoresFor your Friday afternoon reading pleasure, here’s Alan explaining cap and trade to the Stay Puft Marshmallow man:

“We’re consuming too many marshmallows and we’re all getting overweight, so we’re gonna start cutting down on the quantity of marshmallows…”

Read the full article here.

It’s not a perfect analogy.  People (well, some of us) really do want more marshmallows.  But nobody (except maybe these clowns) actually wants more CO2 emissions.  We want the good things that energy provides, like cold beer and hot showers, but we’d prefer to get them without all the pollution.

Still, the marshmallow analogy is a both a clear and entertaining way of thinking about how cap & trade works.  If you want your family to lose weight, gradually reduce the size of the marshmallow bag you bring home from the store; and if you want to cut carbon emissions, gradually shrink the amount of emissions that you let fossil fuel companies spew into the sky.

Next week, we’ll see how many marshmallows Clark can fit in his mouth.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jumbledpile under a Creative Commons license.