Carbon credits


Hiding the costs and passing it off as the free market
One of the things making the rounds among some of the greens is resurrecting the pollution trading scheme of the Kyoto treaty. This time it would be applied to carbon emmissions.

The idea is that every industry would be allocated a certain number of carbon credits. If a company produced more carbon than they should, they could be carbon credits from another company that did not produce as many.

There are three main problems with this scheme.

First, no one has tied carbon emission to global temperature change. There has been increased carbon in the atmosphere during the recent period that the global warming crowd likes to talk about, but historically speaking, carbon in the atmosphere does not mean higher temperatures. That is why it is important to look at ALL the available data and not cherry pick the results you want.

The second problem is that this scheme was originally masterminded by Enron executives who wanted to get in the business of pollution credits just as they had gotten into the business of power capacity credits. That is something that usually gets overlooked. Enron did well until they had to actually compete and didn't have government protection.

And that leads us directly to the third problem. The carbon credits or pollution credits would be distributed by government control. Politics would decide what the total credits were, what industries would be exempt, and who would be most tightly regulated.

That is not free market capitalism.

That is a protection racket masking itself as centrally managed socialism.

Hat tip to Global Warming Watch.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - June 19, 2006 at 05:06 AM  Tag


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