“Offsetting half our emissions (which means paying other countries to cut them on our behalf) makes a mockery of the government’s climate change program.” – George Monbiot
That type of scheme, which is part of cap and trade, is being planned by the EU and the U.S. and other countries to supposedly address climate change. Capping and trading schemes will amount to plans to buy reductions, or offsets, up to 50%, from other countries. That means our “80%” emissions cuts will only be 40%.
Simply put, a cap and trade program will take a long time to bring down emissions because of all the “cheats” in the system, whereas a carbon pricing system would bring down emissions much sooner because it would force conservation. It would also force less use of energy, because it will simply be more expensive to use (by corporations and business, not by people who would get a “dividend”) Instead of trading the permissions to pollute, it would eliminate the ability of countries to cheat on cap and trade schemes by selling permits, allowing already-planned green power plants to count as offsets, etc. This is obvious. Since we are in a climate crisis, then, why not do what needs to be done instead of the most complicated plan available? Answer: Politics and the economy.
We are in a recession, so rather than work out a good plan for reducing emissions, the U.S. government is turning to Wall Street to save our economy. Climate change takes a backseat to capitalism, again. To explain a price on carbon in the easiest way possible, here is a chart I recently discovered. It’s worth 10 articles on the subject because it just tells it like it is:
Click to Enlarge
“The recent passage of the new energy bill by Congress has been heralded as a great victory for the Obama Administration. Most Americans, I suspect, who care at all about climate change, are intimidated by the complexity of the plan – it is rather like trying to bend the mind around concepts like credit default swaps and bilateral netting arrangements – and have resigned themselves to trusting the experts. But why choose an approach that is so enormously complicated, rather than a straight forward carbon tax? The greater the complexity, the greater the potential for failure, but also the greater the opportunity for sleight-of-hand.”
– quote from Toward Freedom, “Why Carbon Trading Won’t Save Us From Catastrophic Climate Change”
For more information on a revenue-neutral cap and dividend system, see the U.S. Climate Task Force, the Price Carbon website and the Carbon Tax Center.
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