James Hansen – the world’s leading climate scientist fighting against global warming – told Amy Goodman this morning that cap and trade not only won’t reduce emissions, it may actually increase them:
The problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased…
See also this and this.
Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are also against cap and trade (and see this and this), as is the head of California’s cap and trade program for the EPA.
Hansen also told Goodman that (notwithstanding Paul Krugman’s assertions) most economists say that cap and trade won’t work:
I’ve talked with many economists, and the majority of them agree that the cap and trade with offsets is not the way to address the problem.
As I have previously pointed out:
-
The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won’t work for global warming
-
European criminal investigators have determined that there is a tremendous amount of fraud occurring in the carbon trading market. Indeed, organized crime has largely taken over the European cap and trade market.
-
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro says that the proposed cap and trade law “has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives.”
-
One the largest boosters for cap and trade invented credit default swaps – which were supposed to increase financial stability, but instead were a large part of the reason that the world economy crashed last year.
|