worldonfirepodcast.org

One Response to “1st world party, 3rd world clean up”

1. David Lewis Says:
   December 6th, 2009 at 5:49 pm

   Annie Leonard’s analysis of cap and trade needs to be rethought. As she says, the future of the planet is at stake (as it has been for the more than the mere twenty years I have been a climate activist), so she should take some time to think about this.

   Cap and trade isn’t an idea fresh out of the heads of “the guys at Enron”, or Goldman Sachs. Look it up. The US pioneered implementation of cap and trade in 1995 to control emissions causing acid rain and the outcome seemed so successful Al Gore and Bill Clinton pressed at the Kyoto negotiations to persuade a reluctant EU to adopt it as the centerpiece of the Kyoto agreement. Where political systems have failed to pass carbon taxes into law, cap and trade has succeeded, for reasons you can observe today in the Congress. Ask any politician how easy it will be to pass a new tax especially to raise the price of fossil fuels because of some climate crisis the eggheads and treehuggers are worried about, in the US. The climate bill in front of the Senate doesn’t even have the word climate in the title. There is a reason for that. The American people are not unified that climate is a great problem demanding attention this instant, no matter who else is.

   The first step to putting in cap and trade, you say, is getting governments around the world to agree to put a limit on emissions.

   Actually, the US could have a carbon tax and swear never to have cap and trade, and a Copenhagen agreement implementing cap and trade in the rest of the world could be signed and it would all work. Under the Kyoto agreement, a nation could do anything it felt like within its borders to live up to its commitment to reduce emissions, including outlawing cap and trade and implementing carbon taxes. Why do you want to oppose what other countries want to do? The EU has a cap and trade agreement in place that has not been that effective because it was designed not be effective in order to get passed into law, that can be made effective any time political will develops. It is simply idiotic to believe that where there is no political will to price carbon emissions out of existence, such as in the US today, that rejecting cap and trade and trying to put in a carbon tax will succeed in pricing emissions out of existence. Ask knowledgeable economists, although most prefer carbon taxes, they recognize the political difficulties of enacting them and they generally say cap and trade can work.

   The permits are given away for free because if they were not given away, there would have been no system at all. As long as you pretend you could pass into law an alternate solution that would be more effective, fine. Try it. Continued failure in the EU to implement carbon taxes led to them putting in their internal cap and trade system to meet their Kyoto obligations.

   Offset permits can be looked at as a way to tranfer funds from the developed world to the developing world which you say you want to see. If help comes to the developing world by way of cap and trade though, you say, it must be a scam by big business that does whatever it wants there. Cheating could be dealt with by policing it, but you say the way is to stop cap and trade. Read the author of the Kyoto agreement cap and trade section, Chilchinisky, in her book, “Saving Kyoto”. At least pay attention to what the argument is.

   The EPA may have the power, but a President can stop the EPA, as Bush did. Something like the Clean Air Act, passed by Congress, is harder for a President to bypass. You don’t like cap and trade because Boucher voted for it. No law encouraging coal use, you say, when the problem is the emissions from coal use, not coal use. A lot of people are pushing agendas from the past saying they care about climate. Try looking at the problem itself and analysing solutions that apply to it.

   So go ahead and oppose cap and trade because it has flaws, torpedo the climate legislation now in front of Congress, and if you’re really successful, torpedo the talks at Copenhagen. Then read up on the flaws in carbon taxes. Do you really think there is nothing that can be criticized, that there is an easy way to get a political jurisdiction to implement one?

   Pretty much all the world’s scientists don’t agree that CO2 has to go down to 350 ppm in the atmosphere. The unity has been over 450 ppm, which can be taken to be synonomous with the 2 degree C target. Jim Hansen warns that it has to be 350 ppm, or we commit the planet to catastrophe, and I agree with him, but that doesn’t make it “pretty much all” the rest of the scientists in the world.

   To do that (reach a 350 ppm target) requires much more than what you announce, i.e. 80% emissions cuts in the US by 2050. Read “The Copenhagen Diagnosis” written by some of the lead IPCC authors, which is intended for anyone wanting to know the state of present knowledge of climate as they tune into Copenhagen coverage. A lot has been discovered since the IPCC AR4 report and it is all discussed here. They write about what the US must take to mean 95% cuts for its per capita emissions, as they say everyone living in 2050 needs to go below one tonne CO2, and the average American today emits more than 20. And this is to meet a 450 ppm target, what Hansen calls “a recipe for global disaster”. To merely cause a global disaster, instead of, say, an end to all life on Earth forever, an American would have to emit 95% less.

   To meet a 350 ppm target all global emissions beyond what the planet can absorb must end as quickly as possible to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of GHG, and CO2 and other gases must be withdrawn from the atmosphere. Hansen is so alarmed he calls for a massive nuclear construction program, and he is saying that if we keep on going the way we have we are going to be lucky to avoid committing the planet to boiling away its oceans. He says we’ve got to get moving, to change the entire direction civilization is moving on in the next few years, such is the momentum of the expansion of civilization, and the momentum of the forces that have been disturbed in the planetary system.

   So the next time you hear someone dump on carbon capture and storage, ask them where are we going to put the CO2 we have to withdraw from the atmosphere to meet the target you say all the world’s scientists agree we must meet?

Leave a Comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website