Thread: Cap-and-trade goes in wrong direction S.D.U.T.

San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial

Climate folly

Cap-and-trade goes in wrong direction

2:00 a.m. August 28, 2009

- This editorial page has for years accepted the science that says the average temperature of Earth is inching dangerously up. We accept the science that says global warming is caused, in part, by man and his machines pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We accept the science that says something must be done about it.

What we don't accept is the politics that says that what must be done is a highly complicated, hugely expensive program of scientifically dubious effectiveness that could spark dire economic fallout across the land.

Like the cap-and-trade scheme now before Congress. Given the science, the struggling economy and the trillion-dollar deficits facing the nation, we ought to first try the simpler, relatively inexpensive and proven solutions.
Like saving the world's rain forests.

The New York Times recently quoted experts as saying that destruction of tropical forests accounts for 20 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Halting new deforestation, these experts said, would be as effective a way to combat global warming as shutting down all of the world's coal-fired power plants.

That jaw-dropping fact is worth repeating: Stopping new deforestation would keep as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as closing all the world's coal plants.

The cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June, and set to be taken up by the Senate next month, sets goals of reducing American greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared to what those levels were in 2005, and by 83 percent by 2050. It would set a cap on total emissions and create a mechanism whereby emission credits would be auctioned off, then bought, sold or traded between polluters with credits to spare and those who need them.

But cap-and-trade is already in place in parts of Europe, where its track record is lousy, buttressing concerns that the system is overly complex, bureaucratic, ineffective and subject to manipulation.

And cap-and-trade proponents in the House had to make so many concessions just to get the bare minimum number of votes needed to pass the bill that any effective potential it ever had is surely not there now.
Saving the rain forests in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere would not be easy or cheap. But cap-and-trade would not make it any easier or cheaper.

The same can be said of other solutions now being ignored. This page does not generally get all giddy about new taxes, but a simple carbon tax on pollutants would almost certainly be easier and more effective than cap-and-trade, as well as a lot less damaging to the broad economy. Ditto for promising geoengineering proposals to directly reduce atmospheric carbon.
President Barack Obama is intent on going to the world summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December with a bill passed by Congress that will re-establish American leadership on global warming.

Better, we think, for him to go to Copenhagen without cap-and-trade and to lead the world in new directions.

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Any possibility that this legislation will benefit big corporations over the small ones who do not pollute? Big polluter has the money to buy credits, keep polluting, while the small non-polluters gets extra income.
And I can see it also helping those poor multi-millionaires who lost their jobs on Wall Street. Will keep them off charity for sure.