You'd like climate mitigation that doesn't require much of anything from you, and that's not going to be possible, whichever way it goes.
It isn't going to hurt me. My business is a service business and the worst we'll feel from cap and trade is increased energy costs, and we can afford those. I thought I distanced myself from a big personal investment in the outcome here by pointing this out earlier, but I guess you saw 'business owner' and assumed 'greedy corporate pig.'
What massive, pervasive governmental intervention are you talking about? The only massive, pervasive governmental intervention I'm aware of is the Clean Air act, which was done for smog and health reasons and not climate change reasons, and fuel efficiency standards, which I will freely admit did spur more fuel efficient vehicles than the free market would have, because in an unregulated market you wouldn't see that kind of investment in fuel efficiency until it became far more cost-prohibitive to get fossil fuels out of the ground.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I'm not accusing you of fabricating governmental intervention - I'm honestly curious what it is you're talking about when you give the government credit for the 'status quo.'
I also have yet to see any convincing evidence that climate change is going to 'hit like a hurricane' except for the UN studies a while back talking about millions of climate refugees that a) never happened and b) got scrubbed from the UN's web site as it was an embarrassing prediction. There is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that we absolutely must do something right now just as there is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that the whole thing is overblown and what we're doing now is working just fine. My point is that it's very, very difficult to separate fact and legitimate science (on both sides) from people who either just grew up thinking that all industry is evil and raping the Earth -- that is to say, most people my own age who went to liberal arts universities, as I did -- or people who are so bitter and jaded and accustomed to hearing people from the first group shrieking about whatever it is they're doing that they overlook the very real possibility that something major may really need to be done about this problem ASAP.
You have said nothing insightful and cited nothing of use. You've made an ad hominem attack on me and my motives about which you could not be more mistaken. If cap and trade were enacted tomorrow, it won't be me who suffers, because web services aren't going to bear the brunt of it. It will be two million jobs in the part of our economy that actually still create products. That is the cost of the massive, pervasive change you are talking about, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. So if you want to make your case, then the case to be made is 'this is such an important problem, and the consequences of doing nothing so severe, that a 2% reduction in GDP (which comes out to about two million jobs) is really the least worst course.'
Possibly the case for AGW would be working out better if it had more adherents who could patiently explain to people like me what the terms of the discussion are and what our options are, and fewer people whose entire social network consists of people who agree with them and whose only means of dealing with anyone who questions their dogma is to personally attack them.