A carbon tax is the most administratively simple choice, their familiar with excise taxes, and EPA enforcement lightens the load

Adding to the extensive list of the complexities surrounding cap-and-trade is the extreme difficulty of enforcement. A carbon tax identifies every person as a polluter, whereas a cap-and-trade only identifies select industries as polluters.170 Under cap-andtrade, monitoring creates many unseen costs and difficulties. Administrative costs are often overlooked, but remain crucial when looking at the costs of emission-reducing actions. The costs of establishing the cap-and-trade program include, but are not limited to, educating the targeted industries, monitoring emissions and compliance, and enforcing the policy.171 To reduce costs as much as possible, regulators must strive for minimal administrative efforts. This usually means that approaches that require monitoring fewer parties and use more readily available information are the most favored.172 This leads to a tradeoff between the extent of a program’s coverage of emission sources and the administrative costs in order to achieve administratively simpler programs. New costs will continue to appear in the creation of a nation-wide cap-and-trade program, but an additional concern lies in our monitoring technologies. In capand-trade, an elaborate system would need to be created to distribute and collect allowances to prevent cheating. This is an extremely difficult and complicated task. Effective measures to penalize those that emit without allowances may be even more difficult. Cap-and-trade will require the creation of a completely new governmental body to take on these administrative and monitoring activities.173 The carbon tax, on the other hand, can be enforced by the IRS and the EPA with their existing staff and extensive experience dealing with excise taxes and clean energy, respectively.