I think I'm gonna go with Subman on this one. It will cost more to do something than to do nothing, and worse, it will be for nothing.
That said, I actually like the idea of an effluent tax. Not cap-in-trade itself, but an effluent tax that is applied on a firm by firm basis. Milton Friedman championed that idea five decades ago. The catch is that the effluent tax should really be the
only tax that industry pays. As the author of Subman's article points out, additional taxes just get passed on to workers and consumers, up to a point. Once tax overhead can no longer be passed to consumers without sacrificing marketability or workers without sacrificing competent labor, it attacks profit and then operating funds. Of course by that point any sane company will have packed up shop and moved elsewhere, which is what they have been doing for three decades now, and will continue to do if cap in trade is passed.