VitalAccurateThinking

Capital Pollution Solution?

Capital Pollution Solution? (NYTimes - reg required)

H/T Air Pollution News

......the trading of greenhouse gas allowances, also known as carbon trading, may be capitalism’s best answer to the problem of global warming. To avoid a dangerous degree of climate change, many scientists say, greenhouse gas emissions worldwide will have to be cut by 50 to 70 percent over the next 50 years. The only hope of achieving that, short of an unforeseen technological breakthrough or the passage of draconian environmental laws, is to inspire radical change in the economic system. In a carbon-trading scheme, you must pay to pollute: price tags are placed on greenhouse gas emissions and then the market (not the government) essentially figures out the cheapest, most efficient way to reduce them. "The beauty of carbon trading,"” Dan Dudek, chief economist at Environmental Defense, a nonprofit advocacy group, explained to me, "“is that it takes a primal human impulse,— greed,— and redirects it toward saving the planet rather than destroying it."

As I posted before here, and here skeptical of these carbon trading schemes. It seems to me that two things are wrong with this:
1) The government set arbitrary, allowable pollution amount.
2) Companies (and theoretically countries and individuals) can then trade the carbon credits on an open exchange.
3) The cost of that credit is then passed on to consumers as a cost of production.

I understand that this scheme is meant to factor the carbon replacement cost into energy consumption. But a scheme is exactly what it is. The bottom line is if you have money, you can consume energy. If you don't have money, you cannot. If this is done on a global scale, it will turn into a wealth transfer from the industrialized nations to the non-industrial nations. Such a wealth transfer to the kleptocracies in Africa will not help them achieve economic growth. Also, I can see all sorts of cheating and corruption going on that will renders such a program null and void. Who is going to monitor emissions? Will an entirely new government agency spring up to administer such a thing?

The only thing this will accomplish is create another way to move money out the hands of the people and into the hands of these traders and the government.

posted by Jim VAT @ 11:19 AM