Is Climate Change Action a Scam in the Making?

Several policies can be implemented to take action to counter climate change. The Kyoto Protocol outlines the benchmarks we should work towards to help reverse the damage. I know some people debate the existence of climate change, global warming or whatever but lets take it as fact for this exercise.

Two policies that have been proposed are cap-and-trade and carbon taxes. While doing some reading on the weekend I found an interesting point raised in the editorial pages of the Toronto Sun. Speaking about these programs, one of the last lines of the editorial summed it up perfectly:

What will they do? Raise taxes and our cost of living through higher consumer prices, with Big Business and Big Government dividing up the cash between them like crooks after a bank job.

That really made me think about things in a larger context. These programs do not really move us to a different economic/industrial model but simply make the current one more expensive. I don't know why I was so surprised but I felt silly and swindled at the same time. I suppose the argument could be made that something needs to be done to transition but as more time goes by without much changing I become more skeptical.