Can we afford cap and trade?

Krugman blogs:

A while back I wrote about anti-green economics — the insistence, by opponents of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that the economic cost of cap-and-trade would be immense and unsupportable. I cited Robert Samuelson, who ridiculed the Environmental Defense Fund for suggesting that major action on greenhouse gases would only cost a dime a day per person.

Now comes the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the cost to households of Waxman-Markey in 2020 at $22 billion — which, given a projected population of 335 million, comes to 18 cents a day. Hah! EDH was being over-optimistic. Seriously, EDF was essentially right: the costs of cap-and-trade are very, very low.

We can afford it.