cap and trade = rearranging the deck chairs

[ensho]

so far I can't see any sense or logic to cap and trade. re: removing and stopping the pollution of our air.

Dem Rep. Rick Boucher was on Wash. Journal this a.m. promoting cap and trade. he boasted that if we pass cap and trade the air will be cleaned up by 2050.

that's way TOO LATE! what nitwitery.

all I see cap and trade doing is rearranging polluter's profits, not removing crap from our air.

can anyone show me a positive to cap and trade? (no rhetoric please)

[Oregone]

1. Whats your plan and how is it better?

As far as Ive read, the "CAP" mechanism of "Cap ad trade" essentially, well, how do you put this, caps total pollution. It sets a finite ceiling on how much pollution can be emitted by all companies. Then, by allocating a finite amount of pollution 'vouchers', the ability to pollute becomes a commodity (like gold, etc) whose price is determined by market forces. Companies will pay as much as it is profitable to pay to be able to pollute, insofar as it is not cheaper to innovate and seek greener methods of production.

I think that if the Cap was truly finite, the competition for the ability to pollute (and the price tag that comes with it) will in fact create an incentive to innovate and find a cheaper and greener way to produce products

[ensho]

3. the logic of all of that makes one's eyes cross

cap and trade is a teeny, tiny step forward in cleaning our air.

the times call for a giant, but painful, step, whatever that step would be.

[Oregone]

5. Totally not true and deceptive

The step forward comes in how much you cap emissions. If they set the cap high, yes, its a tiny step forward. If they set it low, then its a leap.

The measure of its impact isn't the structure of the system, but the actual details.

[Odin2005]

8. And the lobbyists will make sure the cap is worthlessly low.

That is the only reason the elites support it, they can make sure it's worthless.

[Oregone]

10. You can make sure anything is worthless

On that standard, no system has merit.

[karynnj]

32. Great answer

[maxsolomon]

2. we must do something

and america must lead or there is no chance of convincing china and india of limiting their emissions. to say nothing of the rest of the planet. cap and trade imposes a cap, which can steadily be lowered.

BTW, it is already too late. climate change is upon us.

[WhiteTara]

4. I didn't either until a forester told me

about the way to save the redwoods. The ancients suck up much more carbon than the young ones. So, someone pays the timber companies to KEEP the trees in the ground.

[tranche]

6. It's a realistic alternative to 300 million Americans moving to communes.

[Oregone]

11. Free sex communes?

[Odin2005]

7. We need a simple carbon tax. Cap-and-Trade is Free Market Fundamentalist lunacy.

And it's more about allowing upper-middle class and rich people to not feel guilty of their wasteful lifestyles. It's a secular selling of indulgences that won't help the environment because the lobbyists will make sure too many carbon credits are given out.

It's a scam.

[vaberella]

9. +1.n/t

[Oregone]

12. Taxing carbon is lunacy because it creates no finite ceiling for emissions

Companies will pay the tax insofar as it is cost productive to do so, till no ends.

Another problem is that it morphs to a regressive consumption tax upon the general public. It hits everyone at the pump, significantly, forcing lower income people to shoulder quite a large burden of this tax, rather than corporations.

Is there ANY evidence that carbon tax causes a reduction in consumption? Any at all?

I actually have a carbon tax where I live. Its not the worse thing on my wallet, per se, but I see its definite faults. It doesn't make anyone drive less, but just pay more to drive.

[Telly Savalas]

13. So the lobbyists are so powerful too many credits will be given out

but are so impotent that they won't be able to prevent a efficacious carbon tax from being implemented? How does that work?

[doc03]

14. All Cap and Trade will do is raise the cost of electricity

for Americans and China will burn our coal with absolutly no environmental laws. We actually have a shortage of coal miners here, they expect China to buy all the coal we can produce. Just tell me how burning coal in China with no environmental controls instead of here where we have environmental laws is going to help with global warming? Hmmmmm?

[amandabeech]

15. Excellent points.

Thanks for posting.

[doc03]

18. Myself and several others in my neighborhood

converted from oil heat to electric heat pumps and a couple to geothermal the last couple years. Myself I reduced our dependency on foreign oil by 600 gallons a year and now my home is heated by coal mined right here locally creating local jobs. Now I get penalised with a higher electric bill. I (worked) at a steel mill with an electric arc furnace that is now shut down and will probably never start back up because the cost of electricity will kill us off. Yet over in China they use our coal to produce the electricity to run their electric arc furnace and take our jobs.

[amandabeech]

24. I understand what you're saying.

I'm originally from Michigan and the auto and steel plants use a considerable amount of electricity there. Michigan's electricity is generated from coal, gas and nuclear, none of which are favored in this bill.

If electricity rates go up, and I greatly doubt that the increases will be postage stamp sized, any remaining manufacturing jobs will be sucked somewhere with low electricity rates and low environmental standards.

I think that climate change/global warming is real, but I think it is a global problem that requires a real global approach, not a national one.

I'd also note that the bill does not contain any provision for the sequestration of carbon in soil, particularly farm soil. Increased carbon means increased decaying plant matter which makes the soil richer and more able to retain water in drought conditions. Fertile farmland is an incredible natural resource and I am disgusted that there is nothing in this bill to address that point.

[invictus]

20. You are right. nt

[Teaser]

16. musical chairs is fun though

so I'll play.

[Zavulon]

17. I can't.

It's lousy legislation that will hit the poor and middle class hard. The polluters will simply pass the cost on to us, making this yet another regressive tax.

[DuaneBidoux]

19. I don't say it is perfect, and the taxes WILL BE regressive, but in time it will work.

Actually 2050 is pretty quickly and trying in any time shorter than that would probably lead to such a collapse that there could be mass hunger world wide.

The key to making it work is of course that the amount of total carbon permitted into the air goes down each year--this encourages those who can quickly and more cheaply get rid of their emissions to do so since it is cheaper for them to fix it than to pay the cost of the tax. Over time the costs of each unit of emission will go up--this gives those who can't easily make the fix time to adjust and research new technologies to put into place as soon as the price of the technological fix is less than the tax (which will have increased across time).

It may be far from perfect but it is also in no way a rearrangement of the chairs on a sinking ship.

[SwampG8r]

21. considering that

the whole "climate change" foofraw is complete and total fabrication it stands to reason anything generated to "combat" it will also be as fake as britany spears "talent"

[ChimpersMcSmirkers]

29. Who needs an arctic ice cap anyway...

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-extent-in-september-1982-and-2008

[SwampG8r]

30. nice picture but

that doesnt make it a fact
nor does it make it anything proven to be outside the normal fluctuations in temperature on earth over any given real long term period
and it also does not prove any human ability to effect these changes
you might as well try to make the sun cooler
there have been raised temperatures on mercury venus and mars giving good evidence that the sun itself is cycling hot
im not trying to start a big whoopiedoo but i myself consider the claims of "climate change" unproven

[Hippo_Tron]

22. Yes, it adds economic incentive to stop polluting

Lets say we have four companies. Two of them have a high incentive to pollute two of them do not. Now lets say the government imposes a carbon tax of $10. Two of the companies stop polluting because once the tax is added on they don't have an economic incentive to do so anymore. Two companies don't stop polluting because it isn't profitable for them to stop if the tax is $10.

Now lets say the government instead issues a carbon credit to each company. The credit is worth such that it is not enough for the two high polluting companies to continue to pollute at the level they are polluting at. They each need two carbon credits to pollute at the levels they want to.

So they go to the companies that have a low value for pollution and buy their carbon credits each for $10. Now each of the low pollution industries just made $10.

The key is that there aren't really only four companies in the real world. Those two polluting industries soon start to realize that they could get $20 if they stopped polluting. This is because not only would they not have to buy a pollution credit for $10, but they could sell their own pollution credit for $10. This gives them an incentive to start developing technologies that lower their pollution so that they can be a seller of credits rather than a buyer.

Now eventually we get to a point where the supply of credits is high because companies have developed the technology to stop polluting and thus the price of credits are low. At this point the government can start to remove more and more credits from the market. The sellers of credits won't mind because even though they will have fewer credits to sell, their credits will be worth more when the government reduces the amount available. The buyers of credits will complain but there will be fewer buyers and more sellers at this point.

If we simply institute a tax, then polluting companies don't have as much of an incentive to become non-polluters.

Granted, the cap has to be low enough that it's effective. If the cap is so high that companies can continue polluting at their current levels or close to it, then it's useless. But likewise a really low carbon tax is equally useless.

[doc03]

25. How about all 4 just move to China and

do whatever they damn well please.

[Hippo_Tron]

34. We do need to convince Beijing to cut down on their emissions, but...

There's not a chance in hell of that if we don't set an example.

[boppers]

23. In a nutshell:

CAP: Drastically reduce pollution.
TRADE: Sell that reduction.

Rather than using punishment to reduce pollution, it uses profit motives. Whoever can reduce more, can reap more profit.

As far as 2050 being "too late", it's simply not possible to, oh, fix global pollution in the next 15 minutes.

[doc03]

26. In a nutshell they will just move to China and

avoid the whole mess. Four out of five of our local Congressmen oppose Cap and Trade and the fifth is sitting on the fence. If he supports it he will be voted out in 2012. Four of the five are Democrats.

[geek tragedy]

27. So we should invade China, or do nothing?

There is no magic solution.

[amandabeech]

28. If it weren't for the WTO and GATT, we might be able to tax imports of products

made by processes releasing a large amount of carbon. In that way, we could reverse the incentive to high-tale it out of the U.S. to China, India or Brazil, for example.

Now that we're under the uber-free-trade religion, we can't do that.

We're seeing one of the down sides of our trade agreements right here.

I think that global warming/climate change is a huge problem, but I'm in the least bit sure that this particular bill will help or whether it will just push carbon-releasing industries to countries with no laws or unenforced laws on emissions.

[karynnj]

31. It puts a cost on producing carbon

This creates a business reason to decrease the amount of carbon produced, thus creating an economic reason do favor new techniques and products that do this. Though there are differences, cap and trade was very successful in lowering the amount of sulfur put in the air, which was destroying the environment because it made acid rain.

Creating a cost, means that if a business has to chose between two alternatives (say two types of power plants) the difference in the carbon produced will with cap and trade now be reflected in the cost function, where it wasn't before. It is very likely that that cost being there will tip the scale enough over all decisions that we will get reductions.

[stevietheman]

33. My problem with "cap and trade" is enforcement

How do we police all the polluters to ensure they are living up to their agreements? And what if we have another regulation-hating Republican administration in the future that refuses to do much, if any, enforcement?

I have a feeling that cap and trade, while a very good theoretical idea, may not play out very well in reality.