More on regulation, markets, and climate change

This is a followup to yesterday's post in which I said there was no free-market solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Ezra Klein says that's not entirely accurate — markets can and should have a secondary role:

Even if we were all fairly committed environmentalists, there'd really be no way to effectively evaluate the amount of carbon our various activities generate. And more to the point, we don't want to. [...] Carbon consumption should be in the price of my goods, and then I can do what I often do as a consumer and make decisions based on price signals. The government needs to fix the market failure wherein the price of carbon is not assessed in the cost of products, but we actually do need a high-functioning market to accurately translate carbon information into a form we can easily and quickly work with.

So I guess it's more accurate to say that regulation is a necessary part of any plan to lower the emission of greenhouse gases. But the effect on conservatives is still the same: Problem X can be solved only with new regulations; therefore, Problem X isn't happening.