We Must Define the Objectives
Will carbon trading “work”? A policy “works” or fails to do so only in relation to its objectives.
Carbon trading schemes have multiple objectives, including: (1) increase the cost of fossil energy, (2) foster innovation, (3) facilitate long-term business planning, (4) reduce emissions, (5) mitigate global warming, (6) perpetuate itself over the long-term, and (7) transfer wealth.
Carbon trading can certainly accomplish objective (1). Government has a long history of increasing energy prices via environmental regulations, excise taxes, renewable fuel mandates, renewable portfolio standards, restrictions on oil and gas exploration, and the like. Even in the initial phase of the EU emissions trading system (ETS), when most governments allocated permits free of charge and handed out more permits than emissions, allowing emissions to go up, German utilities raised their rates, claiming imaginary costs and passing them on to ratepayers. So higher energy prices under carbon trading is something we—or, rather, the rent seekers—can definitely take to the bank.
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"Destroy industrial society..."
That is, after all, the ultimate goal of the environmentalists, and I think cap and trade would certainly help it along.
"To destroy industrial society ", that is the goal of people committed to relying on non-renewable resources that destroy the economy by inevitably driving up prices (decreasing supply, increasing demand). Whether or not the environment is destroyed in the process is irrelevant.
It is one of the Big Lies of the environmentalist movement that they want to replace oil with renewable energies. They consistently oppose implementing any source of energy that is capable of sustaining the energy needs of industrial society . Windmill farms and large-scale solar panel arrays--inefficient as they are--are still opposed by environmentalists.
I was listening to NPR one day, and an environmentalist was being interviewed regarding some issue or other. He said, laughingly, "of course, the only way to really solve our environmental problems would be for humans to stop having babies for a hundred years." In other words, the only solution is for the human race to die out.
It was said casually, and jokingly, but it went straight to the heart of the issue. The ideal for environmentalists is nature in a pristine state. That is their standard of value. 'Pristine' means untouched by man. They regard every alteration that we make in our environment as a taint, a blight. There is only one way for them to achieve that ideal: Man must disappear from the face of the Earth.
In the 20th century, 100 million people died under communism, they died from the tyranny of a command economy under an ideology that claimed to believe in human progress. Give the environmentalists power , give power to a group that explicitly despises mankind and wants to roll back human progress, and they will make the communists look like amateurs.
I think, my friend, that you speak not of environmentalists, but of something more akin to anarchists or eco- terrorists . This website might interest you:
http://www.vhemt.org /
Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, us mainstream environmentalists have a more idealistic view of the human race. While we may not believe in your exact version of 'human progress', we do believe we have a good thing going here but we are headed in the wrong direction. As our history shows us, as our population grows exponentially, so does our energy consumption. This growth has necessitated a series of paradigm shifts.
As hunter gatherers, we consumed food to feed our energy needs; as we became more civilized we shifted to wood burning, followed by coal , oil , gas , and most recently, uranium. Wood was a renewable resource but we outstripped its availability with our prodigious growth. We believed coal and oil to be unlimited, but as it turns out, they are not. Uranium shows a lot of promise: it is clean and very efficient, but we will eventually run out of it as well.
We've never run out of resource, rather we simply found a new and better one. To run out of a resource would be catastrophic for our civilization, and so we seek a solution that will solve the problem permanently: renewable resources such as wind, water currents, geothermal vents, and solar power are promising avenues in this direction.
Coal, oil, and uranium will hold us over until we get these technologies perfected, but in the meantime we need to invest heavily into their research and expansion while slowly weaning ourselves off of the mainstream resources. We cannot afford to run out of non-renewable resources before a viable alternative is found. You can think of cap and trade as an insurance policy against the downfall of civilization.
The most important resource is human ingenuity. It cannot be commanded from the top down. If you seriously want human progress, then you first have to recognize that the precondition for progress is individual freedom.
You claim that resources like coal , oil , and gas are scarce, but is that true? The scarcity of a commodity will be reflected in its price, according to the law of supply and demand. Demand has been rising with the rise in population and rising standards of living, but the inflation-adjusted price of oil has remained relatively low, because production has been steadily increasing. The recent price increases can be explained as the product of suppressed production due to the war , plus environmental restrictions over domestic drilling and refining in the US. Human ingenuity, left free to operate, could supply us with coal, oil, and gas for a long time to come.
If/when we genuinely start to run out of those commodities, human ingenuity can also transition us to other fuel sources a lot easier if the method of doing so isn't determined by a handful of pull peddlers in Washington. The ethanol scam is a prime example of what we get when we try to solve problems from the top down.
Can you please define this 'human ingenuity'? It seems to me that green energy policies are this very human ingenuity at work in the economy . Large corporations are switching to sustainable resources because they turn out to be profitable in the end. The only losers in this situation are the oil companies who rely on an antiquated resource that is clearly detrimental to the environment (meaning all life on this planet). Unfortunately they occupy such a large and powerful sector of the economy that they will resort to any means to keep their businesses afloat. The real "Big Lie" comes from the mouths of big oil lobbyists that think they can cheat and buy their way out of extinction .
In an ideal world, oil companies would reap what they have sown: they would have to endure the backlash caused by the pollution that their system spews into the atmosphere. Unfortunately it ends up being people who have contributed nothing to global climate change that suffer, such as inhabitants of the Sahel region of East Africa:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4479640.stm
'Human ingenuity' does not arbitrarily improve the lots of one people at the expense of the rest of the world. Sounds to me more like human greed, combined with hubris. We have no choice but to impose top-down measures on those who stubbornly refuse to change their malicious ways. And yes, go ahead and call me a fascist.
I do believe you have revealed your true nature Z. Although your antagonist won't call you one, you are, down deep in your core, a fascist. If government employed fascists, like you, would simply get out of the way, a free economy , with its trillions of human interactions, would solve the problems. You see potential disaster and seek to take a short cut to what you perceive as the solution. Rarely, can humanity find a person as omniscient as you think you and your eco-movement is. Forced human manipulation is the surest way to dire consequences.
Congratulations?
When I was in elementary school we were told that pollution was going to bring about another ice age. After high school, I started hearing about global warming . Now it's been changed to global climate change . That's what I call covering all the bases.
"Rouge ou noir?"
"Oui."
In other words, I consider global climate change to be a scam, a flimsy narrative invented to justify a government takeover of the economy . Pointing a gun at people and telling them to do what you say is not human ingenuity. Greed, if it has any meaning at all, is desire for the unearned. Hubris is thinking that a committee of government bureaucrats should make energy decisions for 320 million people.
If companies are moving voluntarily to renewable energies, then that's wonderful. If they are doing it because of government arm-twisting, that's evil.
I won't call you a fascist, but I will explain to you that what characterizes a fascist economy is government control over the economy via strong-arm tactics. That is what you are advocating when you advocate cap-and- trade . Don't cry later when you find yourself living under a fascist society . Maybe it will be a flavor of fascism that you like, or maybe it will the flavor that Pat Robertson would prefer. Just remember that you asked for it.
I see then this isn't going anywhere. I believe in CO2 levels in the atmosphere having adverse effects on the earth system, you don't. I don't understand how the consensus of thousands of scientists around the world could be a giant government scam (which government, exactly?), but hey I don't pretend to have an objective opinion. Good talking to you.