If Premier Kathleen Wynne prices industrial carbon dioxide emissions by setting up a cap-and-trade market in Ontario, it will be a disaster for taxpayers.

It will be a bigger disaster than the Liberals’ green energy fiasco.

And that’s saying a lot since former auditor general Jim McCarter said in his 2011 annual report that the Liberals had introduced renewable energy so incompetently, that taxpayers and hydro consumers will be paying billions of dollars more for electricity than they otherwise would have, for decades to come.

The Liberals will claim cap-and-trade isn’t a carbon tax. Don’t be fooled.

In reality, cap-and-trade is a carbon tax by another name.

It just raises prices instead of taxes on almost everything.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the Liberals are counting on cap-and-trade generating up to $2 billion a year in revenue for the government, paid for by us.

Cap-and-trade is actually worse than a carbon tax because of its lack of transparency and potential for political corruption, market manipulation and fraud.

It’s no accident the earliest promoters of cap-and-trade in North America were the fraudsters at Enron.

That’s to say nothing of skyrocketing electricity prices (because fossil fuels are used to produce electricity) and increases to the cost of virtually all goods and services.

All of this has already happened in the world’s largest cap-and-trade market, Europe’s 10-year-old Emissions Trading Scheme .

In cap-and-trade, the government sets a gradually declining annual “cap” on industrial carbon dioxide emissions and then auctions off carbon permits to major emitters.

Industries pass along the costs of obtaining these permits in higher prices to consumers, while trading the carbon permits (called credits) among themselves.

Governments that set up cap-and-trade systems inevitably fall under the influence of rich, powerful and politically connected industrial lobbies, which demand exemptions from carbon trading and free credits, with some even charging the public for credits they received for free.

The other major problems are phony credits being issued where there is no actual lowering of emissions, and tax fraud.

We predict that’s what we’re in for if the Liberals bring cap-and-trade to Ontario.​