Something important happened this week within the community that is fighting to stop climate change. Two longtime and highly trusted environmental leaders threw sledgehammers through the orthodoxy that decreed a policy of “cap and trade” is what is needed to get climate change under control. Daphne Wysham, see above, crashed the orthodoxy with her piece in the Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daphne-wysham/cap-and-trade-should-go-t_b_374255.html) and Annie Leonard’s just released second mini documentary, for which Wysham served as an advisor, this one showing the massive flaws of the proposed cap and trade proposals to avert climate change:http://www.storyofstuff.com/capandtrade/
Here’s why I think Wysham and Leonard’s 11th hour, Hail Mary pass may be saving the environmental community from what now looks like a colossal error. Trading has been part of the discussion from the outset within the international negotiations. Most environmentalists viewed trading with suspicion but believed these were small compromises to get the industrialized nations on board. I certainly did. The environmental community’s best lobbyists would get assigned to keep these loopholes as small as possible in the international negotiations. The argument from the polluters was that the industrialized nations could never get all the emissions reductions domestically, and needed to be able to trade for easier pickings from the developing world.
When Vice President Al Gore flew to the international meeting in Kyoto, Japan, 1997, one of his top conditions was for major trading provisions. Further, when the Clinton team blew the negotiations in den Hague, Netherlands in 2000 and the European negotiators walked away, it was because the US team was demanding an unseemly level of offsets for the US agricultural sector. While it gets complicated, the essence of it is this: a variety of schemes have been built into the Kyoto Protocol, carbon trading, carbon offsets and joint implementation, each of which allows continued global warming pollution for the promise of greater reductions elsewhere. Think of the Popeye character Wimpy who says, “I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” The evidence so far is overwhelmingly bad, emissions up, financiers enriched, polluters gaming the system, even some early architects of pollution trading saying that it can’t work for a carbon market. Here’s an extremely well done report on all this that shows Leonard and Wysham are not talking about some small problems that need tweaking. Carbon trading itself is fatally flawed:
http://www.carbontradewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=322&Itemid=292
Doubling our problem is the fact that many of these same schemes are included within the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House (ACES).
The tedious exceptions that were allowed in order to keep the biggest polluters at the negotiating table have now, to steal a lawyer’s phrase, “become the exception that swallows the rule.” In essence, if you allow enough exceptions to a rule (stop polluting) at some point you no longer have a rule.
We shouldn’t be grouchy that Wysham and Leonard dropped this news on us in the final hour before Copenhagen. We should be grateful that they exposed the hollowness of the cap and trade approach before we inadvertently cheered its passage, only to watch emissions keep rising in the future. We now have a chance to get it right, to actually get down to the scientifically sound 350 parts per million, this time without the influence of the money traders or the polluters. Which makes me think about how wonderful it is that Peter Barnes has been patiently waiting in the wings with an idea requiring a cap without a stinking trade, and giving a dividend back to people instead: Cap and cash back. Check it out.http://www.capanddividend.org/
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As long-time public-sector environmental enforcement attorneys, my husband and I encourage you to consider the alternative of carbon fees with rebates (see our vide: The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwPov3kqm0). Not only is cap-and-trade with carbon offsets a completely unworkable false solution. Cap-and-Dividend will only get us half-way away from what’s wrong with cap-and-trade. The clear, effective, affordable and transparent approach is to deal directly with the major obstacle to a rapid transition to a clean energy economy, fossil fuels are still too cheap. Only carbon fees that are rebated monthly to all consumers has the powerful potential to fix this. It would directly insure that investment shifts to clean energy because it guarantees that clean energy will become cost competitive within a known time frame. Rebate insure that consumers can still afford the energy they need. While cap-and-dividend would be better than cap-and-trade with offsets, the debate over the next two months should alert the American public to all the choices. Please consider our discussion paper at http://www.carbonfees.org/home/Cap-and-TradeVsCarbonFees.pdf. Thank you! Laurie and Allan