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What the US Can Learn From Europe's Pollution Credit System
Al writes "Technology Review discusses what a US carbon trading scheme could learn from the flawed European experience. Advocates of carbon-trading schemes like to point to Europe's cap-and-trade program as a model worthy of emulation, but the reality has been less than perfect. A glut of pollution credits, distributed without cost during both the first, transitional phase of the program and the current working phase, drove down the value of the EUAs. As a result, Europe's carbon dioxide emissions remain priced well below 20 euros per ton. With the price of pollution so low, economists say, industries that generate and consume energy have no incentives to change their habits; it is still cheaper to use fossil fuels than to switch to technologies that pollute less. Establishing a carbon price in the US system now, and tightening the system later, could send a dangerously wrong signal to financial markets looking to invest in new energy technologies."
...a huge fraction of the economy will soon degenerate into a free-for-all of special interest group favoritism, graft, corruption, and kickbacks?
Of course, Obama and Congress know all that. That's why they're doing it...
...is that it's not progressive. So Joe Sixpack bears a much higher load in proportion to, say, Al Gore. An article by Robert Zubrin pegs this cost as $1800 for a family of four. This on top of a 9.x% unemployment rate. Huh.
The Army reading list
Anything worth doing is worth doing right!
I think it stands to reason that in order to promote change in industries entrenched in Massive fossil fuel consumption, you have to dangle either a very big and delicious carrot, or have one hell of a punishment system for excessive use of said fuels.
The punishment route would have to be ridiculous in order to be effective, and I would think any kind of Carbon credit system would have to offer enough appeal to make the cost of trading in Carbon credits relevant to the cost associated with finding alternate fuel sources, which I think is a task in and of itself, thus the article mentioned above, the EU seems to have failed at it, and if we start it off wrong, we'll be in the same boat they're in, which is an "Epic Fail" and will be very hard to re-vamp in order to make it more palatable.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
This particular regulatory scheme employs a market mechanism. That's not the same as The Market.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
How about NOT burdening each and every citizen with higher energy costs for some forced and flawed utopian ideal which might result in a whopping 0.2 percent carbon emmissions. further wrecking the U.S. economy and industries.
If the new technologies being talked about, worked on, etc. are not economically feasible because of the current price of other energy generation, too bad.
The solution would be to get the "new" technologies to produce energy at or below the cost of current energy generation, not taxing everyone in oblivion to artificially do this.
Sure, do all you can to help clean up the environment and to minimize or eliminate pollution. I am all for cleaner, greener, etc. I am not for more tax burdens on top of the already increased tax burdens I and many many others are now facing in this country.
The U.S. government is (and has been) in the hands of A) lunatics and B) people that couldn't run a business if their lives depended on it (the greatest majority of them, in any case).
Reminds me of the anime, "Shangri-La". Carbon credits are sold like on a stock market. Kids have the market under their complete control. It's pretty ridiculous.
The other important consideration is making sure you don't just shift the problem. If only a few countries, or even most of them agree to restrictions, the rest of the world will shrug its collective shoulders, and take on the fossil fuel burning and productino that the nicer countries have kept themselves from doing. Specifically, the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
Any plan for such a global problem MUST take into account the actions of such "defecting" countries, or you might as well not bother. That can mean using auction revenues to sink CO2, tariffing non-compliant countries (though with blanket punitive tariff on all of their products; it's too much work to figure out the marginal CO2 impact of any one product when they're not pricing its cost in), and yes, even geoengineering.
"Unilateral disarmament" is symbolic at best.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
The U.S. doesn't learn anything. It "instructs" and it "enforces" but it doesn't learn anything. When the rest of the world moved to the metric system, every school kid was given a metric ruler and a conversion chart for various weights and measures. We were all moving into a newer, bigger, more progressive world... right? Wrong! Business didn't want to retool -- it was expensive and the older minds were unwilling to adjust. The whole idea of prepping the younger generation was for "them" (that would be "us" today) to do the hard work of converting over so that "we" (the "us" of 30+ years ago) would have a plan in place but wouldn't have to actually do anything themselves. But what happened? That's obvious... "they" grew up, got jobs at places of employment who were still unwilling to retool.
The U.S. still doesn't have a difficult time enforcing our will upon others, but the fact that we still haven't updated our game to work well with others is indication enough of how the U.S. doesn't learn anything.
If the goal is 'saving the Earth' Europe's carbon tax isn't working very well. But if the goal is raising taxes and growing government control then it is a success.
So it should come as no surprise that the US is eager to emulate the success of Europe's 'cap and trade' regime. The green movement is basically a watermelon, enviro green on the outside and red communist inside. The green movement was subverted and taken over back in the Soviet days when almost every group that didn't take overt efforts at resisting such a takeover was borged and used as a front.
But to their credit even Greenpeace was against the atrocity the House just passed. Because they still have enough true believers in environmentalism left that understand what the cap and trade plan moving through Congress really is. Any benefit to the environment will be a happy accident. They give away almost all of the credits in the short and medium term to political allies to allow them to pollute all they want. The point is to slowly gain CONTROL over vast swaths of the American economy.
If we really want to control carbon emissions a huge new government structure that will always throw 'free credits' out anytime there is real pain (i.e. enraged ratepayers, a plant about to close, a huge sack of campaign cash offered, etc.) so there won't be much real reduction.
No, just put a straight TAX on energy sources that you want to discourage. Personally I'm not a believer in AGW but I could get behind such an effort on the grounds of reducing our dependence on oil form countries that want us dead. But I can't support cap and trade because a) it won't work and b) is a solution worse than the problem.
Democrat delenda est
Can someone please explain why we're talking about charging companies more to do their work when we're already dealing with 10% unemployment and signs that it will still take a while to fully recover?
Why is the bill worded to demand that only solar/wind be advanced as renewable when for all intents and purposes Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors are cheaper (these renewable sources are much more expensive barring an insanely good breakthrough/require MUCH LARGER areas to be anywhere near current power plant outputs) and also renewable in the fact that they burn their waste, then burn their wastes waste, etc, all the way down to burning 90+% of their waste with the remaining byproduct only being slightly hot for 5-10 years?
Politicians grabbing at money via legislation that's difficult to monitor and enforce, so that companies will invest in technologies that are inefficient or don't exist yet?
How is this a flawed system?
As this article points out (with a nice graph), the market has recovered from its initial missteps. Carbon emissions have been trending down (even before the mega-recession began), and Europe is on track to meet the Kyoto requirements (8+% below 1990 levels) by 2011. The major problems had to do with a lack of data about how much carbon the European countries were emitting. Therefore the cap was set too high. There have been several adjustments since then, and the results have become much better.
One hopes that we'll be able to avoid this, since we have much better emissions data. To my mind, the most important finding of the post above is that corporations are finding massive improvements in efficiency, since the cap has essentially set a price on emitting carbon. This, plus technological development, is going to make the problem a lot less scary than conservative estimates would have you believe.
(Now there are various caveats. The really big one being the ability of nations to "outsource" their emissions by importing from nations with no such caps. But I don't think this is an argument for removing the caps --- rather, we should be finding ways to integrate the trading schemes of those nations with caps, and recover some of the carbon cost on imports from the other nations.)
Yes it is a Market system therefore it is a a Market any utilization of the price mechanism in order to self regulate an industry is a market. I am surprised that one does not yet exist in the US.
I'm still wondering why that was modded flamebait.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Any Idea how they are going to tax breathing?
I know they have not said they are going to do it; but, see option 3 I think the Libs will like it.
The way I see are
1. Flat rate per person
2. Prorated based on the weight of person
3. Just tax the calories in food.
(Carbon production in people is closely related to calorie intake)
Tim S
I'm all for reducing emissions, higher efficiency equipment and all that but this seems like just another attempt to use 'protecting the environment' as merely another tool to bring in more revenue for the government while at the same time creating an artificial industry that would not exist in an actual free market at all. The industries keep polluting the same except now they are paying more tax for it.
The same goes for the 'pay as you drive' GPS tracking system. Bring in a system like this now under the name of protecting the environment while most cars still burn petrol and have a guaranteed revenue stream for when everyone is driving electric cars. This carbon trading and carbon offsetting business is all bullshit and a great way of making money out of people who don't know any better
Soon you will see companies building pipelines and sending the smoke down to a country that charges less for the emissions. What if you pump it into a chimney 12 miles into the ocean? what if you buy an old rustbarge and set up your factory in the high seas? for some businesses this might be worth doing, but we're all pumping out carbon into the same atmosphere so it doesn't really matter a damn how much you pay for it.
If you really want less pollution and more money push up the price of the fuel, the odds are that the stuff will be burned at some stage after being bought and all this saves the trouble of bringing in a separate system for measuring and trading emissions. This carbon trading stuff seems too bureaucratic altogether - do I get paid for removing carbon dioxide from the air and putting it into bottles, if i have a plot of land with a few trees do they pay me? they should. but they probably don't, ya know why? because it's just a money making scam. a stealth tax if you like
This is only dealing with the symptoms, just like any other environmental protection scheme.
There is only ONE environmental problem, which is the root cause for all other environmental issues. Solve that problem and all others will automatically disappear.
That problem is overpopulation. massive overpopulation.
Please go on ignoring the problem while jumping to the conclusion I want to kill 95% of the population, probably applying some eugenics on the way, and mod me -1, Nazi .
Because it's not really about free markets, it's about completely unregulated markets that don't interfere with people getting a lot of stuff and rich.
Then there's the people who call it a tax and therefore an unwarranted interference into the lives of people.
Of course I'll get modded flamebait to, but meh.
What based life form are we?
who gives a shit? this is political/financial news, not news for nerds. TFA never mentions new tech, emerging tech,or existing tech in ANY light that seems slashworthy.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'll not mod you flamebait, but I will grammar troll you if it makes you feel better:
Of course I'll get modded flamebait too, but meh.
FTFY
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What's irritating is that cap and trade can't even do what it's supposed to do anyway.
Consider this: a government says "Ok, we'll only sell licenses to produce 100 million tons of CO2 per year." Factories produce a net 130 million tons of CO2 that year, even though they were only licensed to produce 100 million. There is no mechanism the government can employ to enforce the licenses. They could potentially fine the "overproduction" but that doesn't actually prevent the production of the CO2.
The "credits" bit doesn't work either, and it's even worse than the inability to prevent overproduction. The way I understand it, if I do some activity that offsets CO2 production, I get a credit. The problem is that word "offset". If it was only for sequestration that would be great, but my impression is that if I create a wind farm that produces the same power as a coal plant that would produce 1 million tons, I get a 1 million ton CO2 credit that I can sell to someone else. But since it's possible to create an infinite amount of things that do not emit CO2, there is no cap here either because it doesn't actually prevent the creation of more CO2 - or whatever the target emission might be.
The only real solution is, even though it's not political, is to simply tax CO2 emissions straight up. Those who don't emit don't pay the tax, those who do pay it. For consumers it's simple - you roll it into fuel taxes because CO2 emissions are directly linked to fuel consumption. For powerplants and such you do the same, and the taxes get passed on to consumers.
This solution, I think, has the best chance of actually resulting in the desired outcome without being overly complicated or reliant on false ideas of caps that cannot be enforced.
The biggest issue I see is that CO2 is a byproduct of simply being alive, so you will get into the mess of "do you tax all CO2 emissions, or only those made by machines? What about if some farmer burns brush in his yard? What about campfires?"
In all, it's really quite a mess when at its core people try to dictate the behavior of others. If you offer an incentive and people don't take it, the solution should not be to beat them with a stick and force them to take it.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I will merely quote Churchill here:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
Matt Taibbi, in his article The Great American Bubble Machine, asserts that the next bubble will be the carbon trading scheme. Perhaps that's how the Government and Wall Street plan on keeping carbon credits artificially high. That is until the bubble bursts and they raid our tax dollar barrel... again.
http://www.correntewire.com/great_american_bubble_machine_0
FTA:
The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billions worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of an electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman wants this bill.
Why complicate the process? It is a tax, call it one and make it one in a straightforward sense. Tax coal at some rate, imported petroleum at some other rate and exempt wind and solar energies. Simple. right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The SAVING GRACE of the program is that shares are so low. This is simply an artificially placed surcharge on an economy. I hope that cap and trade in the US is similarly ineffective.
If the price is small, companies will continue unchanged, passing the additional expense along, slowing down the economy. If the price is large enough that other (more expensive) alternatives are cheaper, companies will switch... passing the large additional expense along, slowing down the economy even more.
I haven't heard of any proposed legislation for taxing the CO2 emissions of citizens. And successful cap and trade programs for other emissions have been in the U.S. for a while now(check the wikipedia Emissions trading page for examples). I'll gladly rail against any proposed legislation taxing citizens CO2 usage, but I read through these comments and I feel like I've fallen into a forest of strawmen.
/., but at least RTFS. The stated problem with the EU legislation is that the trade portion of the program was too generous in awarding credits and let pollution continue be cheaper than improving emissions.
And it's fine if you don't RTFA, I mean this is
Markets only happen if that which is being traded is scarce. Pollution credits are not a natural commodity, and they are effectively infinite without regulation.
One of the best ways to reduce pollution is to tax it. Reducing pollution costs money. The purpose of a corporation is to generate profit for shareholders. Given the choice, no corporation would reduce pollution instead of returning a higher dividend. So, for pollution to be reduced, government has to be involved somehow. There are two possible ways:
I recommend that everyone who is interested in this topic should read The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford, particularly chapter "Crosstown Traffic" subsection "Battling pollution on the cheap". The gist of it is that sulphur dioxide emissions were successfully reduced by taxation to the point where the tax is negligible. Initially, the corporations involved in power generation claimed that it would be impossible to do, that each ton of reduction in emissions would cost thousands of dollars. And yet, within 3 years of an auction based taxation being introduced, the cost per ton had fallen to $70.
Isn't this exactly what we all want? A market based solution to the problem, rather than overbearing government regulation?
I will probably be blasted by all the environmentalists in the group, but this simply won't work. My office is two hundred feet from a coal fired power plant. They are upgrading their pollution controls right now. They are spending over $200 million on it. There is a new plant scheduled to be online in a matter of months right next to it. This is the cheapest source of power in the area. It employs hundreds of people. My company had thousands of people last year. The cost of electricity shut us down. All of my friends are sitting at home drawing unemployment. I don't know what they are going to do when their benefits are exhausted. High electricity costs will drive jobs out of America. Power is the primary cost of many manufacturing processes. All manufacturing where power is the primary driver will be done in China, Mexico, Brazil, Iceland, etc. It will be done where there are no carbon credits to buy and the environmental laws are lax. Business goes where its cheap to operate.
You aren't saving the environment by driving out business. The president cited California as an example of good energy policy. A lot of power consumed in California comes from neighboring states that don't have such strict regulations. The government of California is broke. They may not be able to make payroll next month. Is that where we want America to go? Is that our future model?
We are going to drive our businesses overseas. These foreign countries will build power plants to supply their new found industry. They won't care much about pollution other than to pay lip service to it. By the time we are finished cleaning up America's air, we'll all be sitting on our thumbs with no jobs lamenting our plight. On the upside, the air we are breathing during this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth may perhaps be slightly cleaner than before. If your goal is to reverse global climate change, you are sadly mistaken if you think this will fix it. Other nations will fill in the production gaps. They don't give a crap about the environment. They want power. You gain power by having a happy, well fed, and prosperous population. This is done through industry and jobs. The pollution will simply be outsourced along with your job.
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
And there is plenty of disagreement that there are much negative externalities about carbon dioxide. Besides that, what you say makes sense.
And how many scientists disagree?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm pretty sure this guy was joking. If carbon didn't exist, we wouldn't be here.
What part of cap and trade don't you understand ? The point is not to change habit, it's to cap emissions at a certain level. The success of this policy is measured by weather or not the cap is respected and what the impact on production is.
\u262D = \u5350
I prefer to think of it as Indulgence. Like buying a pardon from the Catholic Church for your sins against God, Carbon Offsets are forgiveness from the Church of Al Gore for your sins against Gaia.
Not that the money *can't* be used for good, but it is rather hard to trace.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
no we don't have one. the reason why it's been defeated every time is that the proponents of the bill (typically California, Washington, Arizona, Nevada) receive a large portion of their power from hydroelectric power. So they have renewable sources available. Essentially this is a tax on the breadbasket states who have less clean resources available to them, and who's economies are based more on industry then the states on the coasts. It's been proposed several times, and several times defeated. Cap and trade makes sense if alternatives are more evenly distributed, but unfortunately they're not.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
2. Global Warming has been exposed as false
[Citation Needed]
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
It can learn that carbon trading schemes don't work, is a drain on the economy, and only enriches a few well connected that dreamed it up... while reducing total greenhouse gases by negligible amounts to none.
On the other hand, U.S. can also learn something useful from one of Europe's bigger countries, France: having large numbers of nuclear power plants that provide majority of your nation's electricity needs can be done, practically and safely. Of all the non-carbon-generating "green" energy schemes out there, nuclear is the only one that is practical and cost-competitive with fossil fuels on any sort of a large scale.
Right. "The Market" as we practice it here in America is the one, true free-market system given us by that original free market capitalist, Jesus Walker Christ. You can look it up in the Bible.
This horrible, athiestic "cap, tax and murder babies" system that is being forced upon us by fascistic decree by Barack Hussein Obama (notice how the number of letters in his name almost add up to "666"?) may claim to "employ market mechanisms" it is no more "Free Market" than any religion that claims to worship "god" is anything like the True Free Market Faith given us by our real Founding Father, when the Constitution was handed down to Moses on Mount Sanai.
I know all this because I heard it on the AM radio.
By the way, the AM radio also says that this so-called "health reform" is actually a plan to kill everyone at age 64 and make food out of them for the coloreds and the muslims like all those "european-style socialist" countries do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
SCHEME skeem
an underhand plot; intrigue
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If there was only wind or the sun in the breadbasket. And before anyone says OMG teh wind doesn't always blow and sometimes its night outside, hydroelectric is only a portion of the power in the states mentioned, they also use coal (oh, and wind and sun). The reason it's defeated everytime is corporate protectionism. A market is only free if government does not interfere with it, and if it doesn't interfere with the government. That last part is one that most greedy bastards will ignore while touting the first.
Modded, so posting anon . . . Ashtangiman
That's the whole idea. The purpose is the maintenance of the "Business As Usual" model, where energy and resources are commodities restricted to a highly centralised distribution system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable, centred around an economic system that is based on unending growth and continuous expansion - again, another system that is utterly and fantastically wasteful and unsustainable.
We are facing an immanent and catastrophic collapse of net petroleum availability over the next 10 - 15 years. The present economic downturn is simply allowing us to sustain a production plateau. The collapse of net petroleum is due to several forces, but two big ones are Energy Return On Energy Invested and The Export Land Model.
In a nutshell, with EROEI problems, the oil is harder and harder to get at requiring increasing amounts of oil to get at it. Eventually, the amount of energy (in either oil, or "barrels of oil equivalent" amounts of energy - "boe") required to get the oil out of te ground exceeds the amount of energy in the oil itself, at which point, you simply leave the oil in the ground.
The Export Land Model is a different issue, but similarly thorny, where nations that have oil develop their economy around oil and use more and more of it for their own needs, leaving less and less for export. As the oil production eventually decreases, the export of the oil collapses. Eventually the country becomes an oil importer. The poster child of this is Indonesia, but other nations are following a similar pattern.
The people running these systems have quarterly profit reports they need to answer to. Moving not just a particular country, but an entire civilisation away from a particular and extremely powerful energy source (petroleum) is a complex and difficult process that takes a minimum of twenty years to accomplish if one hopes to accomplish it without massive economic, social, and political turbulence and dislocation, according to the Hirsch Report, which says:
Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.
And while the data is still coming in, it appears very likely that we, right now, are at that peak, in the form of a plateau of production that precedes the ineluctable and permanent downturn in petroleum production.
The lifestyle of driving a gas burning car long distances to work at a job that has little social utility or value will, necessarily, come to an end, and society will have to trainsition into a more localised form. The global military machine will have to be dismantled so the resources that support it go into the survival of civilisation itself.
There is great social inertia to maintain the comfy Business As Usual approach, and a great deal of effort is being expended to derail the de-carbonisation of contemporary civilisation. Certain elites are deeply entrenched in the power system that is sustaining this particular configuration of industrialism, and is hell bent for leather to prevent any alternatives to civilisation from evolving (viz. Dick Cheney, the Chinese gov't, Putin, et al) and are dead set against encouraging it, as such would alter the power structure away from them.
This leads to several conclusions. One is War Socialism, where the world develops into a set of quasi-socialistic industrial state war machines that compete over the resources. This avenue leads towards great instability and possible nuclear war, resulting in something like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This particular regulatory scheme employs a market mechanism. That's not the same as The Market.
What is this "The Market" that you refer to with such reverent caps? Are you perhaps referring to the global energy market--- which is distorted by subsidies, national security spending, and a lack of pricing on externalities such as pollution?
The goal of the legislation is to make energy produced with fossil fuels more expensive. Even so many proponents of the bill claim it will not drive up the cost of energy. How stupid is that? The goal of the bill is to drive up the cost of energy!
And where does the money go? That's the stupidest part, is nobody really knows, it is as convoluted a scheme as anyone could ever come up with.
The only people who will benifit are the people who are lobbying for their little piece of the taxpayer pie right now. What's the very worst part? The senate approved the measure down party lines, squashing a filibuster, without reading even reading the god damn thing, AGAIN. In fact there was a 300+ page amendment to the 1500+ page bill at 3AM the MORNING OF THE VOTE! How can anyone who voted for this even claim to be responsible? This is political absurdity at what I hope to be its peak.
I believe the real goal of all of this is to create a kind of green protectionism. We cannot compete with the likes of China but we can try and create legislation that will exclude them from the market for being heavy polluters. They won't have any choice but to buy expensive technology from us so that they can become cleaner. Hopefully, their costs will go up as well and therefore we will be more competitive.
Actually, I think this is a great idea. I think we should only trade with other countries that are democratic, have a clean human rights records, and are not heavy polluters. Everybody else should be kicked out of our market. Personally, I avoid any product made in China but it is really hard to do without nowadays depending on what you are looking for.
The problem with satirizing the right wing is that it's too easy to be mistaken for the real deal.
Not a typewriter
Don't listen to him. *I* care.
The whole Carbon Trading System is an amazingly blatant scam that is being sold as a feel-good medicine to alleviate our massively overdeveloped sense of guilt and self loathing, while in reality its is just another channel for enriching the regimes in charge along with their cronies, all at the expense of the already ass-raped taxpayers and the small amount of industry that somehow still survives while twitching in agony under the burden of regulation and abuse.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
This article is worthless. It ignores several critical facts: (1) the European cap-and-trade will reduce emissions over the next few years; (2) the over-allocation of initial credits is being addressed; and (3) a comparable cap-and-trade system effectively eliminated the acid rain problems in the United States due to SOx emissions in the 1990s.
In fact, I think the European experience has been enormously beneficial.
First, it has demonstrated that a carbon trading market can exist without bankrupting power producers or other emitters of carbon. The very fact that prices have remained manageable is critical to the fact that the power generation industry in the United States has largely supported the recent cap-and-trade legislation. (Full dislosure: I coincidently work for a company that happens to be part of USCAP, though I only work on climate change tangentially. The thoughts here are my own.)
Second, the EU's grand experiment has created a new industry of carbon brokers who go around the world identifying and pricing potential carbon offsets. The fact that we now have some transparency and price discovery surrounding carbon offsets is a huge benefit. It also has lead to the preliminary steps for creating fungible and verifiable carbon contracts. For example, in a market-based system, a one ton reduction in carbon emissions in China should be able to fetch the same price in Europe or the United States. However, we need set metrics to verify the reduction and to avoid double counting. The European experience has given us lots of experience in what we need to do.
Third, the European experience demonstrated the critical need to accurately quantify the carbon emitted by industry. It is no coincidence that one of the Obama administration's first actions when coming into office was to order industry to begin reporting their carbon emissions.
Finally, we cannot miss the point that Europe is reducing its emissions. Cap-and-trade programs are designed to ratchet down emissions over time. Every year, another 2 percent of the credits just disappear. So the over-allocation may have decreased the speed at which the carbon reduction occurs, but less carbon is being emitted today.
In all the thousands of words of discussion I have read on this issue, I haven't seen one mention of the question of whether gasoline use will be affected by the carbon caps. That seems strange.
"Motor vehicles are responsible for almost a quarter of annual US emissions of carbon dioxide"
You obviously think CO2 is a pollutant the same as in the summary, otherwise you would not be ranting so. So you must agree that it must be eliminated. All of it because you can't leave just a little pollution around, why would that be good?
Did you know that if you eliminated all of your CO2 pollution, all higher forms of life on Earth would cease? Yes, you heard right. CO2 is essential for life on Earth. Without it, all green plants will die. That will be followed quickly by all animals, birds, and fish.
So, do you still think CO2 is a pollutant?
The size of USA's Carbon Footprint will pretty soon become irrelevant as our Economic Footprint becomes that of a toddler, as we join the ranks of the European has-been former empires.
I was hoping to see some logic in this thread, but too bad. I've often seen this supposed failure of the EU carbon markets cited, without anyone ever pointing out the obvious implications.
So carbon emission permit prices were very low. What does that mean? It means there was little demand for carbon permits, right? Too much supply, too little demand. And why is that? It means that emitters were already able to meet their emission targets without using the permits much. It means there were plenty of permits available, more than were needed to meet the targets.
It all points to the same thing: the caps were high, so that it was easy to meet them.
That's not necessarily bad! You're phasing in the system, you don't want it to be too disruptive at first. So you will begin by setting caps generally easy to meet, and gradually tightening up. That's how government always does these things.
Then one thing that happened was that the world economy slowed. This caused production to decline, and therefore carbon output declined. This also reduced demand for the permits. Again, that's not bad! It means that the carbon emission targets were met without a great deal of pain, or at least, without adding extra pain to what was already going on due to the recession. It's a good thing that a cap and trade system has this kind of flexibility, that when the economy slows down, its bite decreases, and then if the economy overheats and starts growing rapidly, the permits will become much more expensive. It will tend to smooth out economic fluctuations.
The bottom line is that a cap and trade system allows the government to set the desired carbon emission level. How that level is met is up to the market. Markets are good at finding the least painful and expensive ways to meet resource constraints, and that is exactly what they have done. It often turns out that initial reductions in resources (whether oil inputs or carbon outputs) can be met surprisingly cheaply, because of the economic notion of marginal production. This is the least efficient and most expensive production which still barely makes economic sense to operate. As costs rise, it is the marginal production which is cut first, not the average production. It means that the production which is taken off-line is the production you cared about the least, the most inefficient and wasteful. It means you can reduce your costs without reducing your profits much. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why carbon prices ended up much lower than people predicted.
Keep in mind too that political opponents of these measures will have exaggerated the likely consequences and how painful the caps would be to deal with. They would have been the last people to explain the points I have made here about how much easier than expected it might turn out to be to meet the caps. This too can have led to unrealistic expectations for carbon market prices.
In the end, low carbon market prices are a great sign. It means that the carbon caps are holding, reductions in carbon are happening, without much negative impact on the economy. We should all hope that our U.S. markets encounter the same fortuitous outcome.
And will lead to nothing more than a bubble.
The carbon credit trading system talked about in the bill sets up a market that requires credit default swaps to collateralize the purchases, it also takes credits away from renewable sources of energy and gives them to the coal industry.
Check out what Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio has to say on the subject. There is a reason the Democratic house barely passed it.
If there's so much pollution and it's killing us all, why are we living so much longer now then we were at the beginning of the 20th century? How about if you just leave me alone to make my own choices and stop 'taxing' me for living? Don't I have a right to my own life, to be decided as I see fit? The argument over how make to taxing people and companies 'simpler' seems like a smoke screen.
You can see this today in Communist China, not exactly a beacon of environmentalism. I know someone from Mainland China who was surprised when she came to America that we didn't need to wipe the windows of our homes to clean off the soot a couple of times a week, to give you some idea of what it's like there. I would think that if anything, the concern on how much cutting back on pollution hurts the employment of the working class (i.e. the proletariat) is classic Marxist dogma, at least that's what Communists actually *say* about the matter. ;-)
Oh thank god someone else get's it. If reducing greenhouse emissions was the true goal of cap-and-trade, then the European model is indeed lacking. If [a portion of] the effort of cap-and-trade is simply to move money around from the producers to the non-producers, then the European model is a partial success. Regarding the French nuclear power solution, I both admire and envy them that they have accomplished what they have. Are there no hippies in France or what? :)
Pollution credits are just modern Indulgences. The last time a market for those was floated, it divided Christendom in twain (or into thirds, if you regard protestant, catholic and eastern orthodoxy as same-level peers) and rocked European political structure to its core.
Whether to regard that as a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise (or perhaps, exorcise) for the reader.
It is my understanding that the single largest problem with the European plan, were offsets.
"Meanwhile, politicians also opened the door wider to so-called carbon offsets, which allow companies to meet their emissions-Âreduction commitments by financing rainforest conservation, renewable-energy investments, and other low-carbon projects in developing countries."
Costs went up due to putting any price on carbon emission. It cost a company 0 dollars before to pollute, now it costs X. That is the downside to consumers, one we'll need to live with until more power can be produced cheaply by renewables.
However, by allowing offsets (A company does not need to change its ways, just plant some trees), there was no incentive to move towards non-carbon polluting energy sources.
The European plan is basically the worst of both worlds: carbon now costs 'something', so energy now costs more, combined with a nice loophole allowing a company to never have to change any of its carbon based energy sources, thereby guaranteeing that the cost of energy would never drop.
This is why I am in favor of pure regulation, similar to the clean water act:
1. Caps that very slowly clamp down on carbon emissions over time.
2. Regulated by monitors similar to water pollutants
3. Companies that don't get their ass in gear and start changing, get fined heavily.
Will this make the cost of energy go up? Yup. However "cap and trade + offsets" does also, only we have zero environmental gain, and zero renewable infrastructure gain.
I prefer to think of it as Indulgence. Like buying a pardon from the Catholic Church for your sins against God, Carbon Offsets are forgiveness from the Church of Al Gore for your sins against Gaia.
Does that mean that people who think that indulgences are BS will start a new country? Perhaps the Protestant States of America?
Then again, it won't take long for the PSA/prostate jokes to get old.
-Turkey
Higher levels of co2 are one of the things that keep the planet from being in a long term and rather drastic ice age. Ya know, ice miles deep extending all the way to the midwestern states, and still rather cold even beyond that south. It is precisely because we have some moderately higher levels of co2 in the atmosphere that Canada, northern and central Europe and large parts of the northern US are even habitable today. Greenland not that long ago had a more temperate climate, for example.CO2 levels are helping us right now, not hurting for the most part. If we were to lose frost free months up north, the planet would lose untold millions of tons of valuable grain production. We'd be facing some serious threats of famine right now if conditions got any colder than they are. A slightly warmer climate in other words is a LOT better than a colder one.
Cap and trade is an outright con and scheme designed to impose a trillion dollar a year tax on everyone, and transfer that money to the already rich globalist investment speculators and traders, and also as a by product, to give them more international control outside of the normal political process. It has nothing to do with fixing the climate. That's the con they are offering, the bait.
If they wanted to fix the climate (which really doesn't need much fixing right now, we are in the middle of a nice temperate period between ice ages, we just mainly need to sort out the erroneous idea that people can live in deserts with no adequate water, this reality is sinking in finally, like in California where they just *screwed* their big food production areas by denying them irrigation water, because they have just slap run out. It's a desert, it just can't support as many people who want to live there as want to given their supplies, plus have the largest winter vegetable production. Geographical reality), or just encourage somewhat cleaner industries (I'm all for energy decentralization and a more wide diversification of energy production and the mass adoption of such things as personal home solar, etc), all they would need to do is offer universal tax credits for those industries and products. No tax is needed whatsoever, no "war on carbon", and zero new governmental employees or additional expense is needed for this either, just a checkbox on your tax form and clip on the receipts if required. And it really is that easy.
Elimination of taxes encourages investments and improvements, not impositions of new taxes-even if they don't call them taxes. Forcing new artificial fees on energy products-which in turn will increase the cost of just about every single tangible product you buy, and a lot of the intangibles as well, such as digital products dependent on expensive hardware plus energy, is a defacto "new tax".
Energy companies could really not give a shit how they go about it, producing electricity for you to send you a monthly bill. They just want that check from you, that's all, it's not rocket surgery to see this. Give them a 100% tax credit to install massive windfarms and solar thermal and so on, that would be a heckuva inducement for them, you'd see them switch from coal rapidly, (as much as feasible anyway), with no "cap and trade" middleman skimming scheme needed.
Same with individuals, give them a 100% tax credit to install say a decent 2 or 3 kw sized home solar rig, perhaps at a limit of around 25 grand in cost, tax credit extending for ten years (within payback time IOW), you'd see twenty (whatever, a lot) new solar companies producing panels and the assorted gear within a few months, and untold tens of millions of panels going up all over the nation. No regressive tax needed. The tax *credit*, the "anti-tax", is the most amazing and *benevolent* tool the government can use for fair and constructive change. I like to call it the carrot method, instead of the stick or "club you over the economic head" method, which for some odd reason they always seem to prefer. Proly because they dig on forcing you to obe
Where's your sense of humour today?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yes their energy is being "taxed" in an effort to get them to switch to cleaner sources, I thought that was the whole point? If the price of the credits comes out roughly the same as the EU then you can expect to pay a dollar or so per week, if they put the squeeze on the credits so the price rises to say $200/ton, that's about $10/week for the average joe and certainly enough to make wind/solar a sound investment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is based on a finite resource created by consensus: the amount of pollution that a society is willing to put up with.
All property is based on consensus at some point: intellectual property, real property (which, of course, was irrelevant to hunter/gatherer and nomadic societies), currency, etc. All those forms a property are also enforced by one mechanism or another. Land is "scarce" only because there is a social fiat which forbids me from using or traversing land I don't own.
They already have a system for taxing motor vehicles proportional to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the vehicle, assuming there are no vehicles with CO2 scrubbers out there.
There is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused a change in temperature in the history of the planet.
You're wrong. Have you ever thought about why greenhouse gases are called that? It's because it's a known fact that a greenhouse rich in these gases will be warmer than the prevailing temperature around the greenhouse. Growers in cooler climates use that to grow plants that are not tolerant to cooler temperatures.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Deforestation is more at fault for any man made climate change than even our ignorant wasteful use of fossil fuels.
Yeap, it's getting to be that way. Indonesia is the third largest emitter of GHGs, behind China which overtook the US, and the US. And most of their emissions is from deforestation. And Europe is a big part of the problem. While Europe is trying to reduces it's emissions, all it's really doing is shifting where the emissions occur. Indonesia is being deforested to supply Europe with biofuels. The natural rainforests are being cut down so palm oil plantations can be planted. A lot of the land is also wetlands which is being drained of water. The dead organic matter left releases a lot of methane which is more than 20 tymes as powerful a GHG as CO2.
Should there be a Law?
Co2 is not pollution. Without it, you would be fucking dead.
What a bunch of dumbfucks.
I don't know, has it? I know in the 11 years I've lived in Minneasota, which shares a border with Canada it's been warm most of the tyme. I first flew up here from Florida to spend Christmas with my sister in 1998 and flew back on 1 January. On the way to the airport one of those bank signs with the tyme and temperature said it was 42 degrees F, but on the radio they reported that in Vero Beach FL, maybe an hour from where I lived, it was 41 degrees. So it was colder there than in Minneapolis. I moved up here the following summer and since then we have had sports retailers buy billboard ads asking God to make it snow in the middle of winter, because it was too warm.
Now it may not mean anything, but if it does then it may say warming, climate change, is real. Many winters I have been here I have been able to go outside wearing only shorts and t-shirts instead of being bundled up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
solar and wind are not blanket solutions. in places like North Dakota, a solar panel never repays the energy it takes to make it! it does nothing for the environment then! You can't put solar panels in Alaska where it's dark half the year round. And wind turbines might have problems in the winter.
goes back to my point, it's HARD to implement those technologies in those states and with a cap and TRADE system clean states tend to benefit ALOT by selling excess credits to states in the bread basket. it's not about the environment. it's about one state with a ton of money trying to screw a bunch of other states who are less fortunate. It's one thing if they had alternatives, but wind and solar don't work everywhere.
this plan takes money from the states that need the most development in terms of clean energy and gives it to the states that need it the least, which is a very inefficient way of doing things! Now the states not only have to pay a tax, but develop technologies that work with their climate, and do so with less resources then were available before the plan. my opinion? what will happen is they'll end up switching to bio fuels and drive the price of food way up, because they don't have other options. Then we all lose.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
nt
I know you mean well, and I sure like the sound of this technology too, but there's a mighty big lack of functioning FBNR facilities around to prove your point convincingly, and most of them are so heavily subsidised as to make independent economic problematic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_Breeder_Reactors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor#History
The science sounds great, but practice has had spotty results.
Blame the politicians all you like, but the economics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Economics) are still unproven.
And when those same politicians block the funds to properly decommission, then all our children will suffer the consequences - it's just a matter of time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decommissioning_nuclear_facilities#.28Lack_of.29_Decommissioning_Funds
You've got to ask yourself, why can't a nuclear power plant get private insurance ?
Geothermal shows such excellent potential, but seems to be completely out of the limelight, probably cause a hole in the ground just doesn't look as cool as a thumping big power station belching who knows what into the atmosphere, or some whopping great spinning blades on the local hills. We all like our toys, even when we know they're not good for us...
There's no simple solution, no easy answer. FBNR sounds great in principle, but not so hot in practice. Just like communism, or pure market capitalism, so I hear ....
Salt is not a poison. Without it you would be dead.
Now eat a few kilos of it today.
Water is not a poison. Without it you would be dead.
Now drink your own bodyweight in water today.
Actually, don't. It'll probably kill you. Just because something isn't bad (or even essential) in small amounts doesn't mean that large amounts of it won't kill you.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
I'm assuming the wind blows in N. Dakota but even if it doesn't N. Dakota would appear to be around the same lattitude as Germany who are a world leader in the adoption of solar power with rooftop units pushing over a GW of excess power back on to their grid last year. Alaska has the ocean and an active volcano not far from it's capital. Plus there is always nuclear for those rare places that really do lack any type of renewables.
"clean states tend to benefit ALOT"
Again this is the point, it's called "market forces", what you seem to be advocating is a form of socialisim (ie: socializing the cost of pollution to support those communities who won't help themselves).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is that energy companies are not able to do what they do in Germany. At the start of each year, they get the certificates for free and sell them all off. Later, they buy them back at a somewhat higher price.
They keep the profit from selling and use the 'cost' of rebuying to justify higher prices to the regulation agency.
As usual, politics is aware and does not care, the public is not, but would care a lot.
I'm a free market capitalist, and as such, understand why this is a bad idea. There are internal and external costs to a product, and the free market has been shown to be a very good regulator of internal costs (cost of product to the user) but not very good at external (cost of product to society). Therefore it's the governments job to come up with a way to internalize those external costs (pollution and health hazards in this example) in the form of taxes or other disincentives.
the problem is that with cap and trade, you don't take an integrated approach to the problem. it doesn't change the equation. truly clean tech is cost effective over the life cycle. the problem with clean tech is it's capital intensive, requiring a company to save before adopting and what cap and trade does is harm the ability of companies to come up with that capital.
I'm not against a pollution tax. but I think it should work based on inspections and targeted cuts. if a company can cut their output and demonstrate it has taken measures to reduce emissions by x%, then they don't have to pay. otherwise tax by output. Then the dirtiest players pay the most making them the most motivated and everyone still needs to clean up. Cap and trade only focuses on making direct pollution costs high, but as long as some power is generated from fossil fuels, being wasteful with clean energy consumes resources that would otherwise go offsetting production by non-clean sources.
so again it's unfair. Just cause I live in AZ or Cali where there's an abundance of clean power, doesn't mean i should be able to use as much as I want. Two companies running at the same efficiency consuming the same power should not be taxed differently. cap and trade doesn't effectively internalize the expense cause it doesn't focus on cutting consumption. and until we have a policy that does that, it's going to have negligible effect.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
so there is nothing to learn.
Fuck carbon credits and fuck every one of you dreadlocked hippies that support them. There is a SINGLE coal fire in China that produces more CO2 in a year than every SUV in the United States. The Chinese STILL rely on coal for heating their residential housing, and that will not change. By supporting this brainless political shit you are dooming our fucking country. While the Chinese and Indians burn cheap coal and oil, we'll still be out in our fields putting up fucking windmills and trying to catch enough sun to light an LED or two. I blame you worthless shits for what this country will be in 20 years; a bankrupt, marginalized fourth-world country in an economic straitjacket of its own design...with lots of corroding nuclear fucking bombs.
Jeez, the mantra continues.
Last year the earth cooled ALLOT
Arctic sea ice has been GROWING
The Green house gas argument is a number scam. (Ponzi anybody?)
And unless we get allot more sunspots soon, we be PRAYING for a little global warming.
On top of all that, the psuedo scientist out there call people that present these FACTS "Flat Earth'ers".
Wake up people, you are being taken for a ride.
Cow farts may be off the table in the US but the ant-animal flatulence movement is going strong in Australia. See Cow Farts & Kangaroos for the story. At the bottom there is an update post that says the state of Queensland is sponsoring three studies to look into the matter.
Been listening to Michael Savage, eh?
TODO: Insert witty sig
I want **all** subsidies ended, every single one of them, farming, energy related, the whole kit and kaboodle.
Same here. No more subsidies! Well, not really no more but I don't see any need for any now. Subsides are only supposed to be temporary aid to get an industry going, but they've morphed into yearly handouts. Which is no different than the General Mining Act of 1872 and all of it's descendants as well as all the drilling and pumping on public property and off shore.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Answer -- Nothing.
Big Story.
Racist Christian God from Alaska, Sarah Palin, .. quits.
Looks like the Supreme A-Hole, is just a dumb-Fu*k.
The live "press conference" gave evidence of drug addiction, immorality, un-ethical, criminal behavior perpatrated by Her Magistry the Governer that the People of Alaska are all too knowledgable of her character, and sick of.
Burn the corpse and shoot the remaining Palin Brood! Burn them all and associates -- i.e. Confederates. Then douse the ashes with gasoline and burn them all again.
Oopsie ... there goes that bizzillion dollar Book deal!
Ta Ta. Back to being the "Trailer Park Trash from Wasilla Palin" again.
Look at the parent post, in which I was responding to "pollution credits" in general. CO2 is not toxic, but it is still "pollution" in the sense that it is an emission produced by human industrial (and other) activity that has a significant effect on the environment when it reaches a certain scale.
There are also many things that we need in small quantities (magnesium, potassium) that would be pollutants if released in the wrong place at the wrong scale, too.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
Sorry it took a while to reply. When I tried to read what you linked to yesterday I didn't get a response. And today I got this:
"The requested URL is unavailable at this time. The following error was reported:
Failed to connect to server"
I wanted to see what it says, this summer is the coolest I've seen in the 11 years I've been here. But winter was mild.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
We could just simply put a 100B of Carbon Taxes into the mix and roll 100B of FICA/payroll Taxes out of the mix of the system of taxes. And let the markets find a level and repeat the process as often as needed to get the Emission rate where you want it. This would effect the markets by 1) Discouraging Carbon Emissions and 2) Reducing the Discouragement to Work.