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You don't have to be Al Gore to be concerned about carbon pollution's effect on our Earth. Scientists and world leaders are constantly considering new ways to reduce emissions, and some have proposed a process known as carbon trading, where companies are given carbon credits that they can either use for their own emission needs or sell to bigger polluters who need more credits. Is this the remedy for our ailing environment, or just a lot of hot air?
Were is this going to get the capital for renewables? From YOU and ME by the Carbon Cap and Trade tax scheme that takes effect in 2012. The carbon cap and trade programs turns the electric, manufactories,heavy trucks, cars, airlines etc into tax collectors for the state. It’s just a tax scheme.!! run by the CARB. Once the gov. get’s into the elect. etc. rates they’ll always remain high and never will go down, just like any other state taxes. The Fed’s already have their multi. Trillion dollar program S.3036 to take effect in 2012. It’s so bad that it has a 900 Billion dollar welfare program for the poor to offset their higher electric and fuel costs. It’s a sleeper to most people but to the politicians and the environmentalist groups who benifit the most from this tax scheme, it's their payday. Nuclear is 1/3 to build than renewables, cheaper($.016 KWH), cleaner(0),and doesn’t cover millions of square miles of State and Fed. lands,runs 24/7 plus the electric companies could finance them by themselves with little gov. help. Plus they can be built by existing tower lines. You want cheap electricty or do you want higher taxes, electric rates, goods and services, with a 5 million work crew tending the renewables, FOREVER? But it’s not a option with these focks because it doesn’t have the cash flow/tax flow/ new gov. programs/ gov. grants/jobs program that renewables offer. Drilling for more oil will keep the costs down for the American Public while it takes 10 years to build anything and get our act together on a cost effective ways to do it. It should be everything and not the gov. picking winners and losers at the expense of the American consummer or taxpayer.
- bcooper
December 1, 2008 11:24AM
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This business of "cap-and-trade" sounds interesting at face value, but the problems I have with it are as follows:
1. Do we really know for sure that "green house gases" really are? How much evidence is there that a hundredth of a percent increase in CO2 (with respect to atmosphere as a whole) will cause any real consequential damages?
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0320-11.htm
(when put in a percentage, 280 to 379 parts per million of CO2 means going from .028% to .0379%, a hundredth of a percent increase in how much content of the atmosphere is made up of CO2)
2. Limiting what a business can do in terms of emissions means limiting what the economy as a whole can do. If it's worth potentially trillions of dollars in costs (according to one critic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUlGoaAOzqA ), then so be it. But I have yet to see the evidence for this.
- F2XL January 18, 2009 7:28PM
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In response to your first point, no, we do not know conclusively how increased CO2 levels will affect the atmosphere. We do, however, know that the CO2 diffuses into the oceans, creating carbonic acid which kills plankton and as a result anything higher on the food chain:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=169
I apologize for how dated the article is, I think it's still valid though.
As for historic CO2 levels, granted they might have been higher millions of years ago; the problem is not with the amount of CO2 but with the rate at which it is increasing, as you can see from this graph:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Were the rates to alter over thousands of years, as they naturally do, perhaps plankton would be able to adapt to the conditions and evolve some defense mechanism. As it stands right now, the carbonic acid in the ocean is destroying the world's coral reefs and everything that inhabits them. Perhaps cap and trade is not perfect, but I think a tax hike is a small price to pay to save all sea life.
- Zmoney187
April 9, 2009 11:42PM
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" http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=169 "
Likewise, we could take the question back further and ask what the effects are per man-made quantity of CO2 towards plankton.
"As for historic CO2 levels, granted they might have been higher millions of years ago; the problem is not with the amount of CO2 but with the rate at which it is increasing, as you can see from this graph:"
Indeed, no one debates that they are increasing but if we can't tell what it's effects would be, then on what basis are we taking action?
"As it stands right now, the carbonic acid in the ocean is destroying the world's coral reefs and everything that inhabits them."
Yes, but to what extent is man-made activity to blame?
- F2XL April 13, 2009 11:45AM
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Please avoid citing realclimate.org - they are a collection of propaganda fanatics perpetuating this scam with deception and outright lies. All you have to do is read any of their 'debunking' articles to see how they lie and obscure the argument with tenuous obscure references and complex convoluted logic - and then triumphantly state that they have debunked the skeptics argument - which they never do.
- agwscam July 22, 2009 9:36PM
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There is a plethora of material available on the internet , that website was simply the first result that came up with a Google search. No one is doubting that increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to increased carbonic acid in the oceans; as to its effect on sea life there is controversy.
- Zmoney187 July 22, 2009 10:02PM
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Part of my job as a software support engineer is to generate the reports sent to the EPA containing CO2 levels generated. I know how these numbers are generated; I had to write the program that generates them. Currently, the numbers are a bunch of baloney. They would not stand close scientific scrutiny.
Why?
Well, the topic is carbon. One of our customers has a CO (carbon monoxide) monitor. Yet the carbon that is shown to be produced by CO is not taken in to consideration when calculating (yes, calculating, not measuring directly) CO2. Furthermore there are within federal law tests that can be run to determine the accuracy of these numbers...these tests are neither run nor required to be run by the federal government . Oh, I generate numbers, but there is no solid backing behind these numbers aside the fact that the formula that we use (as prescribed by the federal government) says that that is the amount that we must be producing.
Remember that most places do not monitor CO2, including refineries and power plants. Why? Well, to put in a CO2 monitor one must be able to troubleshoot it, a procedure which usually involves putting in a gas with a known amount of CO2. But CO2 is a pollutant! There is an alternative: Oxygen. Now that is nice and harmless; certainly not a pollutant. And for the refinery/power plant manager, measuring Oxygen gives him/her a better idea of how the process (refining oil or generating electricity) is working. You dont get that kind of data from CO2.
- TB3 March 10, 2010 5:37PM
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Carbon trading is good, but a carbon tax is better. The argument that a suitable cap is easier to determine scientifically than a tax is wrong.
Some argue that it will be very difficult, even for PhD researchers, to estimate the environmental cost of emitting a ton of a greenhouse gas, so the government shouldn’t try to set the tax rate, whereas anyone, even politicians, can choose a volume level of emissions to allow. Well, sure they can, but it will be as arbitrary as picking a tax rate out of a hat. The only reason it seems easier is because no one would expect any rational basis for an emissions limit, so we’ll just let the politicians fight it out as they always do.
The truth is, if you think about it, that in order to determine the appropriate level of emissions to allow, you have to know, or estimate, the amount of damage caused by each ton. The more the damage, the more you want to limit emissions. No damage—no limit. And that estimate must be compared to an estimate of the cost per ton of reducing emissions in the most economical way. So you have to estimate both the damage per ton and the cost per ton of reducing emissions most economically to arrive at the best tradeoff. With the carbon tax approach, on the other hand, the government needs only an estimate of the damage per ton. You can let the industries consider the costs of reducing emissions for their own businesses, and make their own tradeoff decisions. So the individual businesses do what they are best equipped to do, while academicians estimate the future social costs of environmental damage, which they are best equipped to do.
The above is excerpted from my blog on the subject: http://fearlesstheorist.wordpress.com
- Fearless Theorist January 13, 2009 9:11PM
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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.
- Ardsgaine September 17, 2008 7:50PM
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"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.
- Zmoney187 April 9, 2009 11:50PM
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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.
- Ardsgaine April 10, 2009 12:47AM
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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.
- Zmoney187 April 10, 2009 1:40AM
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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.
- Ardsgaine April 10, 2009 12:58PM
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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.
- Zmoney187 April 10, 2009 6:31PM
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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.
- Ardsgaine April 10, 2009 8:19PM
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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.
- Animal Lover February 19, 2010 11:34AM
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Are we really prepared to measure every last emission from every last company in the US? I don't think I trust the government for this at all, which can't even deliver a letter on time or effectively count the votes on time.
- F2XL January 18, 2009 7:31PM
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Will Carbon Trading Work?
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No
It wouldn't be stopping emissions, it would be redirecting them. A far cry from what people apparently want. I do not believe carbon is the issue. David Evans was the carbon accountant at the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999-2007 and came out in 2008 to say that over his years of work, there was no significant change in carbon levels. It would seem to me that someone buried in the phenomenon for nearly a decade would be the best source to whether or not that is even the problem.
All of the possibilities aside, carbon trading can not work because countries such as China and India are not restricted and are somehow not held accountable for their actions. To say that the United States has the most vehicles "on-the-road" is also far from true. If you visit and part of mainland Asia you will find that somehow the streets of the major cities are congested by the numerous motorcycles which happen to be made there. They had to "clean" the air of Beijin for the olympics (if that's any indication of how bad it was and is). What about the smog cloud off the cost of India, where do you think that came from?
I lived in the asia-pacific region my entire life and I can say for certain that no matter how much cabon trading and reduction we do, if we don't hold the most populous continent of the earth accountable (that's over 1/3 of all living people), there will be no solution.
- TheOni
April 30, 2009 4:51PM
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for whom?
it will probably not reduce carbon emissions in any real way, rather shift the emissions at a major financial benefit to the government and politicians that are the recipient of selling the carbon credits.
- jimbob
June 24, 2009 2:31PM
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