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."
Here's a little question. Does anyone here not see the market working? Toyota Prius? Everyone seems to be doing plugin hybrids by 2010. Google's funding nano-solar. Countless ventures are out there in terms of battery power, renewables...
So if I might ask... what the hell is the problem? There's no shortage of research or money in the field. If technology can solve this problem, it will.
Any tax now would hurt the poor the most. Which is not a nice thing in this economy... much less any other time. The rich can afford a prius and to live in downtown near the subway.
That said, I 100% understand accounting for externalities in the market. Of course, we already tend to have those... it is called a gas tax for gasoline which hasn't be used to pay for roads in a long time.
I would be 100% for a global warming tax... if and only if 100% of the revenues go towards countering the effects of global warming (building levies, moving populations from low lying ares...).
Unfortunately, this is just going to become one massive corruption scheme. Big finance making billions off doing nothing... just playing a game of carbon credits. Governments handing out contracts and making laws to benefit certain businesses and industries... It's going to be a mess. But central planning is always a mess. Americans lived without it for a while... but every country gets its chance to be ruined by central planning.
Carbon never harmed anyone?! Are you kidding!? How much carbon is in a bullet? How much of a bomb's explosiveness is due to carbon reactions? I'll tell you: lots. You say Carbon's a dirty word, I'll tell you what: you're right...it is dirty. Have you ever handled powdered carbon, aka graphite? All it does is dirty stuff up. That stuff's nasty. So I think it's appropriate that carbon is a dirty word...it's a dirty, dirty element.
If carbon didn't exist, we'd live in a very different world.
Bullets are lead*, and graphite is an excellent lubricant.
Gee thanks budyd. That is so not true!
Sorry for the tpyoes, I'm psoting this from the emergnecy room on my balckberry... the doctors said it'll be a three hour operation to remove the pencils from my wife.
everything is safe in certain quantities, everything is dangerous in excessive quantities. The fact that a small level of CO2 is not only safe but neccessary has no bearing on whether or not higher levels are harmful to the climate. In fact, most of the science points to a rapid change in CO2 being the causal agent for climate change. It's effects are not uniform but to say that it hasn't harmed anyone is most certainly not a truthful statement.
No, the fact is that the link between CO2 and global temp is a theory.
so is relativity, gravitational theory, evolutionary theory etc. A theory in science does not constitute a wild guess.
Does CO2 (absent human activity) rise with temp or does it work the other way around.
From the data I've seen, the answer appears to be both. CO2 levels can rise as the result of higher metabolic activity spurred on by higher temperatures and CO2 can also force higher temperatures.
Can a conclusion be drawn from those three facts? No. But it certainly doesn't make the arguments for AGW stronger.
indeed, there's more to the theory of AGW than these facts, that's why people spend years of work doing research on the matter. National policy should be done in such a way as to both limit government involvement and follow the science; not one or the other. Unfortunately, the two sides have become so polarized and fervently supportive of an either or approach that it's unlikely to end well and both ends are outside the realm of sane policy.
Science most definitely has found a correlation between temperature increase, and atmospheric carbon increases. Most certainly.
But, to claim that science has established a cause and effect is either ignorant, or dishonest. Ignorance can be cured, though.
I think you are the one being dishonest. There is hard science behind the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, ie hard science behind increased C02 concentration in the atmosphere causing the Earth to retain more heat.
The discovery channel has had their share of the global warming kool-aid, and they no longer present completely unbiased articles. But, read the article anyway.
Want to save the earth? Plant some trees. Deforestation is more at fault for any man made climate change than even our ignorant wasteful use of fossil fuels. Instead of buying carbon credits, go CREATE some carbon credits. Plant a dozen trees, wherever you live. One pin oak can sequester 5 tons of carbon, in time. Some few varieties of pine can come close to that. Avoid the genetically engineered varieties that are used to make paper. Smaller, more attractive shade trees, such as magnolias and dogwoods will store less carbon, but every ton helps.
Unrelated. Unrelated rant, he says. Perhaps the man doesn't comprehend the English language. I realize that scores of people who belong to slashdot are from outside the US. Possibly hundreds.
In fairness, I'll explain simply how and why the "rant" is related. People are running around, shouting "The carbon is increasing, the carbon is increasing." I tell Chicken Little and friends that they should plant a tree. Chicken Little fails to understand that deforestation not only releases carbon into the atmosphere, but also takes away a huge carbon sink, into which we could otherwise store huge amounts of carbon. Deforestation has continued at a pretty steady pace for the last 100 years.
While Chicken Little blathers about creating carbon credits, he fails to actually create carbon sinks. With nowhere to store carbon, all the carbon credits in the world are meaningless nonsense. It's wonderful that the consensus people and the politicians can make some political capital on their carbon credit scheme - but they are solving NOTHING. Alarmist attitudes can line pockets, but they don't do anything about existing carbon.
Now, go back and re-read my posts. Read the article I linked to again (assuming you read it the first time). THEN come back here and tell us all about unrelated rants.
Then, go plant some trees, stop using paper, and never leave another block of lumber out in the rain to rot. Conservation will go a long way toward solving this contrived man-made climate crisis. Stop wasting stuff. Start with gasoline, then your electricity, then start recycling your trash. Waste not, want not. Plant a tree. Do something more useful than blowing hot air to support a political position.
Too much science supports the conclusion that CO2 insulates and raises temperature of an atmosphere to ignore.
You're wrong. If one is motivated enough and cultivates the proper mindset, it is possible to reach a high enough level of ignore-ance to overcome any given quantity of science, evidence, and logic.
Oh, we aren't taxing Carbon. We're supposedly taxing greenhouse gases. But we aren't really even doing that. Cow farts are completely off the table due to agricultural lobbies. Coal-burning utilities and industries are receiving special treatment, since Democrats get lots of votes from coal and steel-heavy regions. Carbon capture will end up being a wasteful boondoggle. It's not even clear yet whether imports of worthless Chinese trinkets will be taxed based on their carbon usage.
Basically the only thing being singled out for special taxes is oil, which is somewhere in the middle of the list of fossil fuels contributing to global warming. The whole thing is a green-washed sham designed to tax foreign oil in favor of local energy production, without incurring the ire of supernational organizations like the WTO. It's not that we don't need more local energy production, but to pretend that the proposed exception-laden US cap-and-trade system will do anything to significantly reduce greenhouse gases is naive.
...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 [rollcall.com] pegs this cost as $1800 for a family of four. This on top of a 9.x% unemployment rate. Huh.
So pay a uniform "pre-bate" [1]to everyone equal to the "energy tax" they would pay if their income were x% of the poverty level. (Again, that's a uniform prebate to all adults, with no means-testing.)
Then, the only people whose *net* taxes go up are the ones making above the poverty level and don't reduce energy use. And the poor's taxes (by whatever definition you use for x) don't change. And it retains the incentive for everyone, including the poor, to cut back whatever energy consumption they can.
[1] For those of you with low intelligence or born before 1960, read that as "Mail a check".
So pay a uniform "pre-bate" [1]to everyone equal to the "energy tax" they would pay
Hold the phone, homer. How about don't take it from me in the first place! The government can't send you a 'check' unless they take the money from you first.
It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Not sure I understand. My solution was just prebating energy taxes, and I mean the net tax *change* is zero, and if you base it on poverty level energy spending, that makes it progressive. Because you net change in taxes (if they go up) is equal to the tax you pay on each unit of energy you consume *above* the poverty level energy consumption.
In other words, if E is the cost of the energy concent of goods you consume, and t is the effective tax on energy, and P is the poverty level spending on energy, and R is the Rebate, your net change in taxes is:
E*t - P*t
or, t*(E-P).
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
Yes, great concerns, all, but you're changing the topic. The original concern was "but this will hurt the poor". Fine. There are trivial ways to remove this unpleasant aspect without fundamentally changing the plan or its incentives on any marginal unit of fossil fuels. I just explained how.
...is that it's not progressive. So Joe Sixpack bears a much higher load in proportion to, say, Al Gore
Whether a Cap & Trade scheme is progressive depends entirely on how you give out the emissions permits. Auction them off and rebate the proceeds to the taxpayer (even if it's a flat check to every American), you have an enormously progressive plan.** Give them away and you have a regressive plan.
Now if you want a progressive version, contact your member of Congress and tell them to support that. Unfortunately, the regressive version seems to be what the most conservative members of Congress want, and since the Republicans are opposing anything, then that's probably what we'll get. It's still better than nothing, and if you want better, then stop concern trolling about it and start voting for more progressive Congresspeople.
Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won't pinch wallets, behind the scenes they've acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.
Fair enough, but how do you say "We're going to get the economy back on track, and then we'll clean up our act" and prevent anyone from changing course back to business as usual?
We don't have to take artificial action because a healthy economy increases demand for energy (here and in the third world), driving up energy prices and making alternate energy sources cost-competitive (a partial goal of cap-and-trade legislation).
In any case, I hope we can all agree that hurting the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn't help anyone.
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).
In economics, it is generally accepted that the free market only establishes the right price of a good if there are no externalities. Hence, if producing a good is cheap but has large negative external effects (eg pollution, human harm), the market will price it lower than would be optimal for the society at large, because they are paying the price of the externality (eg by cleanup costs, reduced hapiness/lifespan).
The main ways to 'internalize' these externalities so the free market can do its job are (1) explicitly internalizing the externality, eg making employers responsible for workplace accidents, making mining companies etc pay cleanup costs), or (2) taxing the factor causing the externality so the price is about right. The latter option has the drawback of somehow determining the right value of the externality. A Cap-and-trade system does this by creating artificial scarcity, but the amount to cap is difficult to establish and ultimately a political decision.
What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
Ignoring the externality is a fuck-the-others (in this case, fuck-the-children) mentality that has nothing to do with the ideal free market or (broad and/or long-term) prosperity
The cap and trade bill that just passed the house will simply drive all of the industry further to China and the third world where there are scant environmental regulations.
It was really scary watching C-span on Friday where every Democrat talked about how this bill will create jobs and save the planet. That isn't an exaggeration in the least. Then the Republicans would speak and quote from all of the studies showing how it will destroy jobs and our econonmy. Now that the Republicans aren't in power they are allowed to use some sense.
It was very funny how last Tuesday the bill was at 300 pages then on Friday it became up to 1500 pages and then down to 1200 something pages. It was simply impossible for anyone to have read it, let alone comprehend it.
From what I've read of the bill it sounds a lot like the system put in Spain which isn't doing wonders for their economy and also sounds like Agenda 21 of the UN.
Essentially we are screwed. It doesn't matter who you vote for or what ideology you are, unless you're in the big club your face is being stomped on right now.
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.
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:
A blanket ban on technologies. Government says what you can and can't use in your business.
A tax that charges the externality cost back to the original product and lets the market produce the most efficient solution
I recommend that everyone who is interested in this topic should read The Undercover Economist [amazon.co.uk] 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?
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.
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.
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?
Actually, you are quite right. pity I have no points to mod you up. Nuke Energy is indeed the best bet. Wind? when do you need energy to run the air conditioner? When it is hot and still. Hydro? but that hurts the fishes; Tear out the dams!. Other renewable? Show me one ONE ton of steel smelted by "Green" fuel. over the last 200 years, the winner of every conflict has been the country with the greatest production of steel by ton. Yes I know Nuke is evil (TM) but it is the only green tech we currently have. Yes Green.
Of course, Alternately, you could learn Mandarin to speak for better treatment from your masters.
mucking manure in a rice farm is after all an eco- paradise...
Because many of the most powerful environmental lobbies are just a bunch of fanatics who throw around the word "science" even though their hatred of nuclear power is more of a religion.
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 [tnr.com] 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.)
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday July 01, @03:37PM (#28549083)
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 .
That problem is overpopulation. massive overpopulation.
So, what do you think the ideal population should be?
Frankly, I fail to see overpopulation as the problem, since our population (in the advanced countries that are actually capable of limiting pollution) is declining, and has been for years.
> That problem is overpopulation. massive overpopulation.
Nope, you are looking at a symptom not the cause. The problem is the uneven distribution of capitalism and liberty. Go look at the numbers. There is an unmistakable link between freedom, wealth and birth rate. The link is even better if you assume a two generation lag on the birth rate vs the other factors.
The solution is thus simple, bring the blessings of liberty to the huddled masses yearning to breath free. Help them establish a solid rule of law and watch them become quickly become prosperous. Yes their population will spike as improved conditions permit a population boom, but that will soon stabilize and begin to decline. The US is the only thing resembling an exception to this rule and our population would also be in decline without illegal immigration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you can't just say "oh well then they'll be motivated to make an investment in solar and wind" and that will solve anything
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.
The easiest and cheapest way to encourage the growth of green tech is via tax credits. Make solar, wind, hydro and nuclear so attractive you'd be crazy to build any other kind of generating station. Make it so companies buying green power get tax credits. Make it so much more profitable to make and use green energy that the market embraces it. No need for expensive government investment in shaky new tech - the market takes care of all the R&D. Incentives are the way to go. Carbon markets are bullshit.
Actually the easiest way to do it is to tax oil and coal directly. Green tech boomed when gas prices got up to about $5.00 a gallon. Just tax foreign oil directly and you'll have the same effect.
Good luck getting that passed the coal lobbies and big oil lobbies though...
That any government attempt to control... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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...
Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a little question. Does anyone here not see the market working?
Toyota Prius?
Everyone seems to be doing plugin hybrids by 2010.
Google's funding nano-solar.
Countless ventures are out there in terms of battery power, renewables...
So if I might ask... what the hell is the problem? There's no shortage of research or money in the field. If technology can solve this problem, it will.
Any tax now would hurt the poor the most. Which is not a nice thing in this economy... much less any other time. The rich can afford a prius and to live in downtown near the subway.
That said, I 100% understand accounting for externalities in the market. Of course, we already tend to have those... it is called a gas tax for gasoline which hasn't be used to pay for roads in a long time.
I would be 100% for a global warming tax... if and only if 100% of the revenues go towards countering the effects of global warming (building levies, moving populations from low lying ares ...).
Unfortunately, this is just going to become one massive corruption scheme.
Big finance making billions off doing nothing... just playing a game of carbon credits.
Governments handing out contracts and making laws to benefit certain businesses and industries...
It's going to be a mess. But central planning is always a mess. Americans lived without it for a while... but every country gets its chance to be ruined by central planning.
Parent
Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Funny)
Yup.
I particularly like how we're taxing carbon. Carbon is a dirty word now, despite it never harming anyone.
Unlike the real threat of Di-Hydrogen Monoxide!
Parent
Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:4, Funny)
I heard about that... that's some scary shit. Like how if you breath it, it will kill you damn fast. Apparently it feels a lot like drowning.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Funny)
Carbon never harmed anyone?! Are you kidding!? How much carbon is in a bullet? How much of a bomb's explosiveness is due to carbon reactions? I'll tell you: lots. You say Carbon's a dirty word, I'll tell you what: you're right...it is dirty. Have you ever handled powdered carbon, aka graphite? All it does is dirty stuff up. That stuff's nasty. So I think it's appropriate that carbon is a dirty word...it's a dirty, dirty element.
If carbon didn't exist, we'd live in a very different world.
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If carbon didn't exist (Score:3, Insightful)
What based life form are we?
Re:If carbon didn't exist (Score:5, Funny)
We are ugly bags of mostly Di-Hydrogen Monoxide.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:4, Insightful)
um... Hate to burst your bubble, but most explosions are due to nitrates not carbon. Bullets are lead*, and graphite is an excellent lubricant.
-nB
*I know, not any more they aren't...
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Funny)
Gee thanks budyd. That is so not true!
Sorry for the tpyoes, I'm psoting this from the emergnecy room on my balckberry... the doctors said it'll be a three hour operation to remove the pencils from my wife.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Insightful)
everything is safe in certain quantities, everything is dangerous in excessive quantities. The fact that a small level of CO2 is not only safe but neccessary has no bearing on whether or not higher levels are harmful to the climate. In fact, most of the science points to a rapid change in CO2 being the causal agent for climate change. It's effects are not uniform but to say that it hasn't harmed anyone is most certainly not a truthful statement.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the fact is that the link between CO2 and global temp is a theory.
so is relativity, gravitational theory, evolutionary theory etc. A theory in science does not constitute a wild guess.
From the data I've seen, the answer appears to be both. CO2 levels can rise as the result of higher metabolic activity spurred on by higher temperatures and CO2 can also force higher temperatures.
indeed, there's more to the theory of AGW than these facts, that's why people spend years of work doing research on the matter. National policy should be done in such a way as to both limit government involvement and follow the science; not one or the other. Unfortunately, the two sides have become so polarized and fervently supportive of an either or approach that it's unlikely to end well and both ends are outside the realm of sane policy.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you are the one being dishonest. There is hard science behind the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, ie hard science behind increased C02 concentration in the atmosphere causing the Earth to retain more heat.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard core scientists aren't out making the pitch for carbon credits, my friend. Those people are still researching, studying, and hypothesizing.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/01/trees-earth-freeze.html [discovery.com]
The discovery channel has had their share of the global warming kool-aid, and they no longer present completely unbiased articles. But, read the article anyway.
Want to save the earth? Plant some trees. Deforestation is more at fault for any man made climate change than even our ignorant wasteful use of fossil fuels. Instead of buying carbon credits, go CREATE some carbon credits. Plant a dozen trees, wherever you live. One pin oak can sequester 5 tons of carbon, in time. Some few varieties of pine can come close to that. Avoid the genetically engineered varieties that are used to make paper. Smaller, more attractive shade trees, such as magnolias and dogwoods will store less carbon, but every ton helps.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unrelated. Unrelated rant, he says. Perhaps the man doesn't comprehend the English language. I realize that scores of people who belong to slashdot are from outside the US. Possibly hundreds.
In fairness, I'll explain simply how and why the "rant" is related. People are running around, shouting "The carbon is increasing, the carbon is increasing." I tell Chicken Little and friends that they should plant a tree. Chicken Little fails to understand that deforestation not only releases carbon into the atmosphere, but also takes away a huge carbon sink, into which we could otherwise store huge amounts of carbon. Deforestation has continued at a pretty steady pace for the last 100 years.
While Chicken Little blathers about creating carbon credits, he fails to actually create carbon sinks. With nowhere to store carbon, all the carbon credits in the world are meaningless nonsense. It's wonderful that the consensus people and the politicians can make some political capital on their carbon credit scheme - but they are solving NOTHING. Alarmist attitudes can line pockets, but they don't do anything about existing carbon.
Now, go back and re-read my posts. Read the article I linked to again (assuming you read it the first time). THEN come back here and tell us all about unrelated rants.
Then, go plant some trees, stop using paper, and never leave another block of lumber out in the rain to rot. Conservation will go a long way toward solving this contrived man-made climate crisis. Stop wasting stuff. Start with gasoline, then your electricity, then start recycling your trash. Waste not, want not. Plant a tree. Do something more useful than blowing hot air to support a political position.
Carbon credits my ass.
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Funny)
Too much science supports the conclusion that CO2 insulates and raises temperature of an atmosphere to ignore.
You're wrong.
If one is motivated enough and cultivates the proper mindset, it is possible to reach a high enough level of ignore-ance to overcome any given quantity of science, evidence, and logic.
-
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Re:That any government attempt to control... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, we aren't taxing Carbon. We're supposedly taxing greenhouse gases. But we aren't really even doing that. Cow farts are completely off the table due to agricultural lobbies. Coal-burning utilities and industries are receiving special treatment, since Democrats get lots of votes from coal and steel-heavy regions. Carbon capture will end up being a wasteful boondoggle. It's not even clear yet whether imports of worthless Chinese trinkets will be taxed based on their carbon usage.
Basically the only thing being singled out for special taxes is oil, which is somewhere in the middle of the list of fossil fuels contributing to global warming. The whole thing is a green-washed sham designed to tax foreign oil in favor of local energy production, without incurring the ire of supernational organizations like the WTO. It's not that we don't need more local energy production, but to pretend that the proposed exception-laden US cap-and-trade system will do anything to significantly reduce greenhouse gases is naive.
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The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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 [rollcall.com] pegs this cost as $1800 for a family of four. This on top of a 9.x% unemployment rate. Huh.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Interesting)
So pay a uniform "pre-bate" [1]to everyone equal to the "energy tax" they would pay if their income were x% of the poverty level. (Again, that's a uniform prebate to all adults, with no means-testing.)
Then, the only people whose *net* taxes go up are the ones making above the poverty level and don't reduce energy use. And the poor's taxes (by whatever definition you use for x) don't change. And it retains the incentive for everyone, including the poor, to cut back whatever energy consumption they can.
[1] For those of you with low intelligence or born before 1960, read that as "Mail a check".
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Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hold the phone, homer. How about don't take it from me in the first place! The government can't send you a 'check' unless they take the money from you first.
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Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Not sure I understand. My solution was just prebating energy taxes, and I mean the net tax *change* is zero, and if you base it on poverty level energy spending, that makes it progressive. Because you net change in taxes (if they go up) is equal to the tax you pay on each unit of energy you consume *above* the poverty level energy consumption.
In other words, if E is the cost of the energy concent of goods you consume, and t is the effective tax on energy, and P is the poverty level spending on energy, and R is the Rebate, your net change in taxes is:
E*t - P*t
or, t*(E-P).
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
Yes, great concerns, all, but you're changing the topic. The original concern was "but this will hurt the poor". Fine. There are trivial ways to remove this unpleasant aspect without fundamentally changing the plan or its incentives on any marginal unit of fossil fuels. I just explained how.
2) How will you fund the "prebate"?
From the auction revenues.
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Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Informative)
...is that it's not progressive. So Joe Sixpack bears a much higher load in proportion to, say, Al Gore
Whether a Cap & Trade scheme is progressive depends entirely on how you give out the emissions permits. Auction them off and rebate the proceeds to the taxpayer (even if it's a flat check to every American), you have an enormously progressive plan.** Give them away and you have a regressive plan.
Now if you want a progressive version, contact your member of Congress and tell them to support that. Unfortunately, the regressive version seems to be what the most conservative members of Congress want, and since the Republicans are opposing anything, then that's probably what we'll get. It's still better than nothing, and if you want better, then stop concern trolling about it and start voting for more progressive Congresspeople.
** Citation, from the CBO analysis. Sadly I have to give the graph excerpted on this blog page, since I didn't have time to hunt for the original: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/making_cap_and_trade_regressive.php [thinkprogress.org]).
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Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:5, Informative)
Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won't pinch wallets, behind the scenes they've acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.
-Wall Street Journal
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Re:The thing about a carbon tax... (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have to take artificial action because a healthy economy increases demand for energy (here and in the third world), driving up energy prices and making alternate energy sources cost-competitive (a partial goal of cap-and-trade legislation).
In any case, I hope we can all agree that hurting the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn't help anyone.
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Yeah, funny that. (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Yeah, funny that. (Score:5, Insightful)
In economics, it is generally accepted that the free market only establishes the right price of a good if there are no externalities. Hence, if producing a good is cheap but has large negative external effects (eg pollution, human harm), the market will price it lower than would be optimal for the society at large, because they are paying the price of the externality (eg by cleanup costs, reduced hapiness/lifespan).
The main ways to 'internalize' these externalities so the free market can do its job are (1) explicitly internalizing the externality, eg making employers responsible for workplace accidents, making mining companies etc pay cleanup costs), or (2) taxing the factor causing the externality so the price is about right. The latter option has the drawback of somehow determining the right value of the externality. A Cap-and-trade system does this by creating artificial scarcity, but the amount to cap is difficult to establish and ultimately a political decision.
What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
Ignoring the externality is a fuck-the-others (in this case, fuck-the-children) mentality that has nothing to do with the ideal free market or (broad and/or long-term) prosperity
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Re:Yeah, funny that. (Score:5, Informative)
The cap and trade bill that just passed the house will simply drive all of the industry further to China and the third world where there are scant environmental regulations.
It was really scary watching C-span on Friday where every Democrat talked about how this bill will create jobs and save the planet. That isn't an exaggeration in the least. Then the Republicans would speak and quote from all of the studies showing how it will destroy jobs and our econonmy. Now that the Republicans aren't in power they are allowed to use some sense.
It was very funny how last Tuesday the bill was at 300 pages then on Friday it became up to 1500 pages and then down to 1200 something pages. It was simply impossible for anyone to have read it, let alone comprehend it.
From what I've read of the bill it sounds a lot like the system put in Spain which isn't doing wonders for their economy and also sounds like Agenda 21 of the UN.
Essentially we are screwed. It doesn't matter who you vote for or what ideology you are, unless you're in the big club your face is being stomped on right now.
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Re:Yeah, funny that. (Score:4, Informative)
In Spain every "green" job created came at the cost of 2.2 "regular" jobs lost.
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But... taxes actually work! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [amazon.co.uk] 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?
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And one lesson you can learn *before* failing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And one lesson you can learn *before* failing (Score:5, Funny)
Specifically, the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
Not to mention Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Oman. The LEGOBRICs will be the building blocks of our destruction.
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Success depends on the goal (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Wind/Solar Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wind/Solar Only? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Wind/Solar Only? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Flawed? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this a flawed system?
The counterpoint (Score:5, Informative)
As this [tnr.com] 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.)
Only dealing with symptoms, not the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 .
Re:Only dealing with symptoms, not the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what do you think the ideal population should be?
Frankly, I fail to see overpopulation as the problem, since our population (in the advanced countries that are actually capable of limiting pollution) is declining, and has been for years.
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Re:Only dealing with symptoms, not the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
> That problem is overpopulation. massive overpopulation.
Nope, you are looking at a symptom not the cause. The problem is the uneven distribution of capitalism and liberty. Go look at the numbers. There is an unmistakable link between freedom, wealth and birth rate. The link is even better if you assume a two generation lag on the birth rate vs the other factors.
The solution is thus simple, bring the blessings of liberty to the huddled masses yearning to breath free. Help them establish a solid rule of law and watch them become quickly become prosperous. Yes their population will spike as improved conditions permit a population boom, but that will soon stabilize and begin to decline. The US is the only thing resembling an exception to this rule and our population would also be in decline without illegal immigration.
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Cap and Trade Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The Great American Bubble Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [correntewire.com]
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.
Put me in the "It won't work camp" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What U.S. Can Learn from Europe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This particular regulatory scheme employs a market mechanism. That's not the same as The Market.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that the money *can't* be used for good, but it is rather hard to trace.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Like your Dad used to say..... (Score:5, Insightful)
The easiest and cheapest way to encourage the growth of green tech is via tax credits. Make solar, wind, hydro and nuclear so attractive you'd be crazy to build any other kind of generating station. Make it so companies buying green power get tax credits. Make it so much more profitable to make and use green energy that the market embraces it. No need for expensive government investment in shaky new tech - the market takes care of all the R&D. Incentives are the way to go. Carbon markets are bullshit.
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Re:Like your Dad used to say..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the easiest way to do it is to tax oil and coal directly. Green tech boomed when gas prices got up to about $5.00 a gallon. Just tax foreign oil directly and you'll have the same effect.
Good luck getting that passed the coal lobbies and big oil lobbies though...
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