This Year's Dumbest Political Idea....
H/T Digital CrusaderTCS Daily - This Year's Dumbest Political Idea....
It seems like establishing a system of carbon credits and the necessary trading scheme appears to be popping up more and more. Glassman and TCS takes the idea apart:
We're only halfway through 2006, but the winner of this year's prize for the dumbest political idea can already be announced. Its originator is the British environment minister, David Miliband, who in a recent speech to the British Audit Commission suggested introducing state-enforced limits on individual carbon emission. "Imagine a country," he said, "where carbon becomes a new currency. We carry bank cards that store both pounds and carbon points. When we buy electricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds. To help reduce carbon emissions, the government would set limits on the amount of carbon that could be used."Glassman points out difficulties with such schemes that I have previously recognized: government determination of the correct emission levels and the nightmare to enforce them. Of course the carbon credit traders and the big government proponents like such programs. They increase government's power and the traders get their commissions.
There's only one problem with this idea: it wouldn't work. Worse than that, it would result in an administrative disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since the catastrophic experiments with wage and price controls in the early 1970s.
Like the old price control policies, Miliband's carbon emission idea is based on two important fallacies. The first is the idea that government is somehow best placed to determine the required individual carbon emission levels.
The second fallacy is the idea that government would be able to enforce the scheme. People will look for ways around the scheme, and the experience from the 1970s suggests that they will find them.
Tagged:Global Warming
Tagged:carbon neutrality
posted by Jim VAT @ 10:49 PM
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