Re: In NYC, Meet the Emission Trading Advocates on Earth Day
On Apr 17, 2007, at 5:26 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
Big oil companies, in particular, can win property rights to
pollute at the level they always have, instead of facing up to their historic
debt to the Third World for using it as dumping ground.
That’s not entirely accurate - and I’m no fan of cap-and-trade,
either. The are two parts to cap-and-trade systems, as the name
suggests - the capping part and the trading part. The caps are
supposed to decline over time. So oil companies and other polluters
are not going to be free to pollute at the level they always have.
And once again, in this passage you elide the differences between c&t
and carbon offsets. They’re not in contradiction, but they’re not the
same either.
There are a lot of problems with c&t - extreme volatility of permit
prices and intense administrative difficulties. But it’s not fair to
deny that proponents aim to see the level of emissions decline over
time.
And I heard Nicholas Stern speak at Columbia less than a week ago -
if and when I get the audio I’ll run excerpts on the radio. He spoke
at some length about equity issues, and said that the burden of
emission reduction had to fall on the rich countries. Your excerpt
here seems to deny that. Stern also professed not to be opposed to
carbon taxes, or fixated on c&t; in fact, he said a variety of
approaches is needed. He is fixated on carbon sequestration, which
seems loony; where would one store 27 gigatons of carbon every year?
The Stern Gang’s goals are too modest, their time-scale too
leisurely, and their policy instruments often dodgy, but you should
represent their proposals accurately.
Doug