an environmental kick in the shorts for the economy, the poor and the Midwest

It's always a mixed bag in terms of trading off economic growth and environment-- sometimes good, sometimes not so much. In any case, it's not a good time for such trade-offs.

Here are the WSJ editorialists on "cap-and-trade" and the disproportionate impacts of the regulations on the East/West coasts vs. the heartland...

Cap and trade is the tax that dare not speak its name, and Democrats are hoping in particular that no one notices who would pay for their climate ambitions. With President Obama depending on vast new carbon revenues in his budget and Congress promising a bill by May, perhaps Americans would like to know the deeply unequal ways that climate costs would be distributed across regions and income groups....

Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing "polluters," not workers. Hardly....the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices....

Hit hardest would be the "95% of working families" Mr. Obama keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat "unless you use energy." Putting a price on carbon is regressive by definition because poor and middle-income households spend more of their paychecks on things like gas to drive to work, groceries or home heating.

The Congressional Budget Office -- Mr. Orszag's former roost -- estimates that the price hikes from a 15% cut in emissions would cost the average household in the bottom-income quintile about 3.3% of its after-tax income every year....The rich would pay 1.7%....

But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels -- particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, Southern and Plains states....