Washington, DC – As the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change opened today in Poznan, Poland, grassroots climate activists took over the Washington DC office of Environmental Defense. The activists stated that they had targeted ED, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world, because of the organization’s key role in promoting the discredited approach of carbon trading as a solution to climate change.
Dr. Rachel Smolker of Global Justice Ecology Project and Global Forest Coalition read a statement, which said in part, “My father was one of the founders of this organization, which sadly I am now ashamed of. The Kyoto Protocol, the European Emissions Trading Scheme and virtually every other initiative for reducing emissions have adopted their market approaches. So far they have utterly failed, serving only to provide huge profits to the world’s most polluting industries. Instead of protecting the environment, ED now seems primarily concerned with protecting corporate bottom lines. I can hear my father rolling over in his grave.”
The activists rearranged furniture in the office, illustrating how marketing carbon is “like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Others held signs reading “Keep the cap, ditch the trade” and “Carbon trading is an environmental offense.”
Leo Cerda, an indigenous activist with Rising Tide Ecuador said, “ED wants to turn the atmosphere and forests into private property, and then give it away to the most polluting industries in the form of pollution allowances that can be bought and sold. Not only is this an ineffective way to control emissions, it is also a disaster for the poor and indigenous peoples who are not party to these markets and are most impacted by climate change.”
ED has been key in establishing the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business consortium advocating for a cap and trade system with extremely weak emissions reductions. US CAP allows polluters like Duke Energy, Shell, BP, DuPont, and Dow Chemical to claim they are green while continuing with business as usual. In recognition, activists awarded ED the “Corporate Greenwash Award,” a three foot tall green paintbrush. “We think this award is appropriate since Environmental Defense spends more time painting polluters green than actually defending the environment,” said Matt Wallace of Rising Tide North America.
Opposition to carbon trading is growing as it becomes apparent that market based schemes do little to fight climate change while helping corporations rake in profits. Earlier this year, over 50 groups came together in the US to denounce carbon trading in a Declaration Against the Use of Carbon Trading Schemes to Address Climate Change. Globally, hundreds of environmental, social justice, and indigenous groups have come together to oppose such market based initiatives as inherently unsustainable and ineffective in creating a just transition away from fossil fuels.
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It’s time to draw a line in the sand and clearly reject market schemes as a new form of colonialism forced upon the people who are least responsible for the climate crisis. The same forces who have created the market meltdown are now claiming to save us from melting glaciers.
It’s not enough to say we want climate action; we can’t let ourselves be co-opted by groups using grassroots pressure for action as a platform to push false solutions.
Carbon trading is hardly an environmental offence. The entire point of the carbon market is to create carbon credits by reducing carbon emissions. I think the market has to, indeed, be regulated in order to avoid the attrocities you’ve mentioned.
Overall, I think that we are better off putting our energy into making the carbon market, taxes, credits, etc work properly as opposed to calling out their faults. It will work as long as actual reductions are being made.
I am hugely skeptical of the usefulness of cap and trade as well, but I’m also afraid it may be what we have to deal with. Unless we can reverse Obama’s cap and trade dreams really, really quick, I think we might be better off advocating for the best cap and AUCTION we can get. Plus, the Western Climate Initiative, which covers a good number of states and Canadian provinces, is going full steam for a cap and trade scheme. Here in Washington we’re fighting hard to make it way better than it is.
you don’t change the dominant paradigm by asking for a slightly better version. You do it by demanding what you believe is right. We shouldn’t be begging for crumbs from Obama or anyone else. The fact of the matter is that cap and trade clearly doesn’t work. We cannot afford to dilly dally when it comes to climate change. It is all or nothing. We are near the tipping point. Cap and trade systems have done nothing but allow the biggest polluters to profit from carbon markets while allowing ghg emissions to continue to rise. If we get a slightly better version, we will still lose, and we will really see it getting hot in here. As in most of the Earth being uninhabitable for humans. It is unconscionable to advocate for a system that does not work simply because it is currently the only system currently deemed “realistic” or “politically feasible”
The head of the european energy comission has already deemed the European Emissions trading scheme a “failure”. We need strong cuts in emissions with severe penalties for not meeting them. I’m talking jail time, for these corporate fat cats who are going to send us over the tipping point so that they can make an extra buck. We can’t allow them to trade away our futuer
it seems to me that if we are ecological activists, than we should be looking at our goals in an holistic context rather than the linear and reductionist viiews that plague the
bi
ig green ngo’s approach. those of us living in the heart of fossil fuel extraction zones and areas soon to become extraction zones know that our health will be safe guarded only when extraction stops! that has to be part of the debate. by giving polluters rights and permits to pollute they facilitate the poisoning of our communities. do you thiink were going to sit back aand let you sell us out? hell no!
Sweeeeet action!!! About time someone called them out on their collaboration with Corporate America, particularly on their coordination in USCAP with some of the worst or the worst climate criminals.
Great Action! Hope this inspires more to come!
wooo! this is sweet… thanks for speaking out !
It just blows me away how there are so many well-meaning mainstream environmentalists out there who can put themselves so deep in bed with the institutions killing the planet and screwing over people (of color) all over the planet… how do they do it? how do they manage to keep themselves in denial, look in the mirror in the morning and say to themselves “i’m doing something good in the world.” How can they believe that getting corporations to slightly green themselves is a step in the right direction? How can they call that being “realistic” or “pragmatic”? How they manage to continually blind themselves to the reality of the effect of their actions?
Maybe actions like this will serve as a little wake up call. But probably not. They’ll probably just huff and puff in indignant outrage, and continue on with business as usual, “going green”
Some further reading on Environmental Defense:
http://www.gregpalast.com/fill-your-lungs-its-only-borrowed-grime/
http://www.nonprofitwatch.org/edf/
Some further reading on Environmental Defense:
http://www.gregpalast.com/fill-your-lungs-its-only-borrowed-grime/
http://www.nonprofitwatch.org/edf/
I support these guys 100 percent in their protest.
Green Delaware supported the RGGI Cap & Trade program in Delaware as a step in the right direction.
In the end, the pols and mainstream enviros came together to make it into a farce.
A special offender was The Nature Conservancy, whose Delaware board chair is the state’s most prominent polluters’ lawyer.
Alan Muller
totally sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet. I’m sure those corporate hogs are feeling really bad after your totally sweet power action and they’re totally going to change the way they do stuff and join the revolution! Don’t stop. Protest everwhere, every day and everything. It’s really making a differnece. People are changing everwhere and breaking free of corporate chains. It’s working man! Great strategy!
This is what EDF does. They focus on market-based environmental solutions. Because they live in the real world, and understand that things don’t get accomplished when angry mobs storm into an office with a bunch of poster boards to read their “manifestos”. Yes, cap and trades are not the answer, but they’re a step in the right direction. Certainly wrongly-focused, self-righteous tactics such as these are not helping anyone’s issue. Maybe I’m too “mainstream”, though.
Davey and others,
The purpose of this action was not to change EDF’s mind on carbon trading, it is abundantly clear that they are already firmly in bed with the corporations. The purpose was to show that there is opposition to market based mechanisms for fighting climate change. And to spark a debate with in the climate/eco movement. As well as to call out these big greens that are more interested in pandering to corporate America then calling for the necessary change we need.
You agree that cap and trade is not the answer, and it appears that numerous people on this blog ultimately agree that its not really going to work. So shouldn’t we work to defeat cap and trade instead of resigning ourselves that it is the only “politically viable” option?
We have 5-10 years to turn this massive ship, known as global greenhouse gas emissions around. We don’t have time to waste on a system that allows corporations to buy credits so they can continue to pollute.
What is wrong with us coming together and saying, “We need to stop burning fossil fuels, ASAP” As in 10 years or so. And any company that continues to do it, loses their corporate charter and their execs get thrown in jail, or something to that affect. Why do we need to lower our demands to allow them to trade their way out of actually reducing emissions? Are we saying that corporate profits are as important as a planet with a climate stable enough for humans to live on?
I know that everyone on this blog is dedicated to fighting climate change. We need to really assess what works and what doesn’t. It is quite clear that carbon trading does not work. Lets lay this horrible get rich quick scheme to rest and start working on real solutions.
I want to thank everyone for keeping it civil in the comments. I was really worried that a flame war was about to break out, and I’m happy it did not. I am not a big fan of all of ED’s actions, which often marginalize impacted communities and alienate the grassroots environmental movement. I’m also not a proponent of carbon trading as the best way to stop climate change, but I have yet to see another idea gain serious political traction. Knowing that it takes years for an idea as a big as this to gain the political support it needs make it into law, I’d rather work to make the system that has a good chance of being enacted effective (with 100% auction, for example) rather than attack the supporters of this regulation. Thanks for keeping the debate lively!
Interesting commentary, I’d like to hear people’s alternatives to a market based system for reducing carbon emissions. Most of the comments seemed focused on screwing corporations, which to me is not a particularly effective form of change. ED has chosen a centrist and perhaps ineffective approach, but in choosing to have a dialogue with these corporations, at least they have a seat at their table.
Cap and trade certainly has its drawbacks and far more preferable alternatives would be a cap and auction or cap and rebate system (as proposed by Peter Barnes). In each case though, this still comes back to creating a market for carbon, which recognizes that GHGs have a cost that need to be valued. Currently, GHGs are an externality in our economic system with no cost associated with their emission. Much of the problem with the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme has to do with the legislation itself, which allotted too many credits and created a leaky cap, not the market based system as a whole. Under this system carbon simply did not hold enough value to push emitters to change their ways. The devil was in the details. We should be focused on getting the details of the legislation right here in the US, making sure we have an aggressive and comprehensive cap, not trying to derail the emerging consensus and momentum behind a market based emissions system.
Dear Robbie and others,
to specifically respond to this quote:
“The devil was in the details. We should be focused on getting the details of the legislation right here in the US, making sure we have an aggressive and comprehensive cap, not trying to derail the emerging consensus and momentum behind a market based emissions system.”
I believe that the devil IS the details, and by details I mean the whole framework of market based approaches, the techno-language it requires, the idea that carbon can be measured, and most importantly, that “valuing” something is the same thing as attaching a dollar and then buying and selling it.
You cannot buy and sell what you don’t own… inherent in any of these approaches require turning carbon (or more specifically the earth’s ability to cycle the element called carbon… or the planet’s breathing cycle) into a commodity – it is yet another enclosure of the commons into private property.
Did putting a price on land and creating private property from communal lands help preserve the land itself? Does privitizing water help keep it clean and accessible by all? Or do these systems help the mighty and powerful expand their Ownership into new realms.
Pricing carbon and having people own it is opening a new frontier for capitalism to expand into. The business community’s interest in carbon markets is not to save the world, but to expand their ownership into new realms, and to buy the rights to continue doing what they are doing.
That is plain and simple, but they hide it with all their details. Their details are the devil. And the devil’s old remedy says… If you’re dying from poison, try taking some more poison.
Personally it reminded me of the People’s Front of Judea. Check: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE
I don’t understand why EDF is vilified. They’re only one of a number of environmental groups in USCAP. If they’re so pissed about the injustice of USCAP, why don’t the protesters also show their well-intentioned but misplaced idealism at NRDC, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Resources Institute?
And where does this belief that cap and trade hasn’t worked come from? The only cap-and-trade program that has come to maturity is the clean air act, and most would say that’s been the most effective environmental policy in the last 25 years.
Sure, the most recent programs haven’t reduced emissions much, but that’s because they’re in their infancy and their caps are still high. Once, the caps are lowered, emissions will reduce… that’s the point of the CAP.
In terms of how credits are apportioned is a matter of debate, but if you really care about protecting jobs, finding some way to protect American industries that manufacture the inputs for clean tech is going to be important (Cement, Steel, etc.). It’s not the worst idea ever to protect our manufacturing sector.
great action Rising Tide!
1) one goal of the action was to draw attention to cap and trade bull, the climate action partnership and the big greens that are in bed with the corporate interests. One post suggested that since the action targetted one of these big “greens” specifically rather than all of them equally that the action should be disregarded. whatever, i wasn’t there but maybe ED had logistically the easiest office to invade. good enough reason to single them out. If the nature conspiracy’s office in your city is more vulnerable than ED’s than go after them.
2) cap and trade is not a step in the right direction. it’s an industry-backed strategy to redirect real grassroots pressure into some political hoodwink that purports itself to address the problem but really 1) perpetuates the status quo; and 2) (and this is even more dangerous) makes it harder for grassroots activists to gain traction on a real solution.
thank you rising tide! oh my word how i love rising tide!
w
Great. Lets eat each other alive rather than push for more aggressive legislation. The reason Cap-and-Trade programs have failed is that radical activists are pushing against the very idea of a market-based system, rather than pushing for a BETTER market based system. Unless you put a price on carbon, emissions are simply going to keep going up and up and up. Carbon markets are a viable way to do that, so long as they are mandatory, well audited/regulated, and sharply reduce the cap for carbon each year.
The problem here is that someone came up with a viable solution to climate change, but it wasn’t environmentalists, it was economists. Our movement (environmentalism) stems from leftist thought, which tends to be very anti-economic. In order to truly abate climate change need to stop being a “Liberal” movement and become a solution-focused movement! That means focusing on what can be done right now, rather than waiting around until the perfect socio-econo-environmental paradise arrives.
We need to put our energy into making sure that the solutions that are on the table are as good as they can be, and once they are in place, we need to work to make them even better. Sitting around complaining about capitalism isn’t going to stop it, and the sooner we can swallow our “idealism” and get to work the better.
So, we seem to have two options:
1) A small group of die-hard environmentalists says “we _can_ get rid of fossil fuels if we just put our mind to it. So lets do it. None of this stupid cap-and-trade business!”
Leaving out whether it is indeed possible to keep civilization while going cold-turkey on fossil fuels in the next 10 years (and I grant that it might be, though I think it is unlikely without human trauma larger than what we expect from climate change), it is politically never going to happen. We don’t have the lawmakers in any nation who would be willing to make that leap, let alone the US. And there isn’t the bottom-up support for this sort of change either, outside of a few echo-chambers – heck, I lived in “the People’s Republic of Cambridge” for years, and I don’t think you could get a majority of people _there_ to go cold-turkey on fossil fuels, much less the majority of people in Ohio, Minnesota, or Virginia (to name some states that helped elect Obama, who I think and hope will indeed do something serious about climate change).
Option 2) Pass a cap-and-trade bill within the next 2 years. Make sure that the cap-and-trade bill actually yields a price for carbon by installing a “floor” (to differentiate it from the European Trading System practice period where the price dropped to near zero because of over-allocation). At the same time (and I know that even Environmental Defense people don’t like this, so you guys are going to hate it) add in a Safety Valve. The purpose of the safety valve is three-fold: one, prevent temporary price spikes that don’t have much environmental benefit but cause a lot of unhappiness. two: make the bill feasible to pass. three: with safety valve flexibility, maybe a lot of other “cost containment” measures that are less well understood can get dumped (eg, poorly quantified offsets, international trading, etc.).
The price in the first few years of the system will reduce emissions somewhat by rewarding people and industries that are more carbon efficient. More importantly, it will send a signal that we are actually going to _do_ something on climate, that there is a price and that the price will go up. _That_ will stop construction of coal plants and other long-term carbon intensive capital investments. That will give incentives to companies to become the next Big Company in solar, wind, geothermal, you name it.
And yes, we _should_ auction most of the permits, and use revenue recycling to reduce the regressivity of the carbon price. By hating on cap and trade because it “gives money to polluters” you are ignoring the fact that Obama, Congress, and most academics have all come out in favor of mostly or 100% auction plans.
Or, possibly, Option 3: if you really think cap-and-trade isn’t going to work, then why don’t you come up with a realistic alternative – and a realistic pathway to getting there. It is easy to criticize the leading solution, and to sabotage it by refusing to accept reasonable compromises (I sometimes wonder if back during the Kyoto negotiations, rather than jumping up and down until the US accepted an 8% below 1990 target, if there had been the option of a safety valve, whether that treaty might have had a chance of being submitted to Senate for ratification. And if that had happened, where we might be today – with a cap and trade that had a decade of testing and improvement, rather than still trying to get the first attempt out the door), and easy to say “we have to get to zero-carbon future” without a politically and economically viable way to get there.
ps. As far as my credentials: I have given money to the Sierra Club and Union of Concerned Scientists over the years, I sold my car and live carless, I have gone mostly meat-less, I’ve written peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate change, etc. etc. All of which is great, but if we can’t get a majority of the country to believe in evolution, if a significant percentage of the country doesn’t even believe the global warming is anthropogenic, how are we going to persuade the entire country to voluntarily change their entire lifestyles? I think moving towards a less consumeristic society is great, but while we work on social changes from below, I think that we also need legislation from above, and that legislation will work most efficiently, and be most likely to actually be _implemented_ if it is market based.
Thanks for listening to my rant,
-Marcus
Pollution trading creates a whole separate “free market” for pollution traders, with all of the irreconcilible problems in that (i.e. inherent acceptance of price volatility (e.g. $250k / lb. of PM in LA under RECLAIM, which, despite that, has not led to any significant innovation), gaming, over-allocation, stifled innovation, cross-boundary enforcement, phantom credits, blown caps, weak links and lowest-common-denominators, etc.–any one of which can doom the system. Whereas the “market mechanism” of a carbon fee or tax sends a transparent price signal to polluters (a fixed penalty) which they can plan on and will motivate them to actually reduce their emissions and make investments (versus speculating/ banking on future low prices in a free market that has the opposite effect of stifling innovation and meeting any long-term reductions goals.)
Cap-and-trade sounds well and good in theory, but once we add-in the known overlay of political reality, we get political favors of over-allocation, financial incentives for fraud (e.g. under RECLAIM oil companies under-reported their emissions and over-reported their car-scrapping offsets by factors of 10 to 1,200), fraudulent offset projects the world-over, and laughably low prices per ton of traded carbon (e.g. 2 cents per ton of carbon under Phase I of the EU ETS, or $3.07 per ton in RGGI’s first market-launching auction in Sept.) Even though the EU has put a price on carbon, 40-50 coal-fired power plants are still marching forward.
The EU ETS has and is failing. RGGI is over-allocated and prices will likely remain so while it allows banking. RECLAIM failed, and yet continues to exist 10 years later. In Los Angeles, one of the principle architects of RECLAIM was convicted in federal court for printing and selling $17 million worth of fraudulent credits on her home laser printer. If this can happen under one of the most sophisticated air pollution regulatory bodies in the U.S., what about in developing countries where cross-boundary monitoring and enforcement is nearly non-existent? This presents opportunities for a new “Enron-Environmentalism.”
And comparisons to the Acid Rain program are sheer fiction. The acid rain program did not allow offsets, did not require serious innovation (unlike SO2, there is no such thing as a readily-available low-carbon scrubber), and was miniscule in comparison to the economy-wide proposals for a carbon market. (See also, “Dispelling the myths of the acid rain story (part 2)” Environment, Date: 7/1/1998, by Don Munton, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-20979661.html (This article documents that most of the improvements from the acid rain program did not result from trading. Rather, an abundant source of low sulfur fuel became available and nearly all of the improvement in acid rain and the low expense of reduction are attributable to this fact.); Gar Lipow, Gristmill, Feb. 19, 2008, (”Compare the success of the often-touted sulfur dioxide trading system the U.S., instituted in 1990, with the speed and quantity of reductions under rule-based systems during the same period. U.S. SO2 emissions dropped by 31% between 1990 and 2001. Over the same period of time, under old fashioned rule-based regulation, Germany reduced its emissions by 87%, Italy by 62%, and Western Europe as a whole by 57%. … In general, it is not surprising that emission trading discourages innovation. The whole point of spatial flexibility is to encourage use of all cheap means before turning to expensive ones.”)
In regard to carbon trading, municipal utilities in LA are telling us that they are committed to meeting an aggressive 33% RPS goal and are willing to invest $1B to do so, but don’t want to be double-penalized and forced to buy offsets in the short-term under a C&T program (according to study by Stanford researchers up to 2/3 of offsets would have happened anyway, paying for nothing.) A trading program is a major barrier and distraction diverting billions to traders and unscrupulous offset projects the world over. A luxury that low-income rate-payers and consumers simply can’t afford in this economy. As a ratepayer, I’d rather see my higher energy costs go towards deployment of renewables than to creating and destroying HFC23 in China, plowing over native forests in Brazil with eucalyptus plantations, and purchasing cheap plastic tarps from Costco to cover pig piles in Patagonia… all of which have been real offset projects.
The whole theory behind trading that the “free market” will magically find the cheapest reductions possible conversely undermines the expensive investments needed to develop & deploy renewable clean sources of energy (E.g. it costs approx. $1M/ mile to build transmission lines for solar.) Markets arn’t magic. Deregulation taught us something.
A straight-forward carbon tax would not unleash the pandora’s box of trading. (For simple comparisons see, “Time to tax carbon,” Los Angeles Times , May 28, 2007; “California’s Cap-And-Trade Won’t Work,” LA Times, Mar. 10, 2008; “The Real Climate Debate: To Cap or to Tax?”, New York Times, Nov. 2, 2007; “Tax on Carbon Emissions Gains Support,” Washington Post, Apr. 1, 2007; “Cap and Charade: The political and business self-interest behind carbon limits,” Wall Street Journal, March 2007.
See also, Josh Harkinson, “Turning Carbon Into Gold,” Mother Jones, July/August 2008, http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2008/07/outfront-turning-carbon-into-gold.html; Spencer Reiss, “Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory,” Wired Magazine, May 19, 2008, http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_07trading; John Vidal, “Billions wasted on UN climate programme: Energy firms routinely abusing carbon offset fund, US studies claim,” The Guardian, May 26, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/26/climatechange.greenpolitics
If you all are as passionate and educated about the climate as you say you are, then you realize that we are hurtling headlong into a hell-hole of immense proportions. The current amount of suffering and oppression in this world today is too mind boggling to comprehend in totality, and the institutions causing this current suffering are the same ones who have brought us this terrifying future – what is coming down the pipeline (literally) is exponentially worse than what is already happening today.
Let me share something with you – except for my two grandparents, my father’s entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust, killed off by the Nazis. They were operating with a certain logic – a logic of imperialism, expansion, and purification. Their specific group has been disbanded, but that logic is alive and well – it was the logic of Manifest Destiny and indigenous genocide. It is the logic of colonization.
To everyone who says that let’s work towards a “better market based system”, “better rules” and all the rest of it… Try telling that to my grandparents’ family as they are lead into the gas chambers. Would you try to reform the Nazis, make their apparatus just a little bit better? Would you call a substitution of one kind of gas for the chambers with another a “step in the right direction”? Would you work real hard to submit your resume and become part of their power structure so that you can “fight them from within”? Or would you do your damndest to band together and escape, and rebel, fighting for your life?
See, the Nazis knew that in the face of overwhelming suffering, people’s psyches shut down. So you can offer them two limited choices, and people will tend to try and get by with what is “better”. Wear a patch or not? Get your papers stamped or not? Try to get in the line for the work camp or head down the line to the train station?
Each “step in the right direction”, when that direction is outlined by those in power, is a step closer to annihilation.
The Jews who fought back in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a much higher rate of survival than those who did not.
To Naomi: Oh, I agree on you about a tax. Really, a cap-and-trade with a floor and a safety valve is designed to be more tax-like then just straight cap and trade.
I disagree with you, however, on the success of the Acid Rain program: for example, “an abundant source of low sulfur fuel became available” – my understanding was that the low sulfur fuel was available before the Acid Rain program, but the coal plants weren’t about to spend the money to ship low sulfur coal across the country without some incentive. When there was a price on sulfur, those coal plants had an option: install expensive SO2 equipment or buy Powder River Basin coal. A lot of the plants decided that the latter was a cheaper route to reducing SO2 emissions, and so they did. And _that_ is the strength of a market based mechanism over more traditional command and control methods. And the politics of the issue was Republic Senator Simpson of Wyoming and other Powder River Basin senators signed on to the cap and trade mechanism whereas they would have fought against the more traditional technology regulation approaches. Yes, the reduction in railroad costs that made it cheaper to ship low sulfur coal wasn’t expected, but that is another advantage of a market based mechanism – flexibility. An omniscient regulator could do good command and control, but us imperfect regulators like more flexible instruments.
As far as the comparison to Europe goes: Mr. Lipow is being rather misleading: Germany dropped its SO2 emission by 87% because of reunification – East Germany was godawful dirty, and Germany gets to take credit for shutting down all the dirty industry there. Similarly, Thatcher in Britain wanted to break the coal union, and her success there lead to a large drop in both CO2 and SO2.
I agree you do need to be careful with perverse incentives, like credits for destroying HFC23 in China that might not have been produced in the absence of those credits, or credits for biofuel that leads to forest degradation. Also, in addition to setting a market price, there are other useful activities for government: get rid of perverse subsidies, like tax credits for parking places in new buildings, cheap and easy permitting and leasing for oil drilling, mortgage deductions for McMansions, and so forth. And the government can also step in for R&D, land use planning, public transit investments, and other issues. And some gases aren’t well covered by markets – land use change CO2, N2O, and agricultural methane emissions are all hard to monitor, and so would be better addressed by non-market regulation.
But the point is, there are ways to use market mechanisms intelligently that will reap large environmental benefits. And market and non-market regulations can have lots of synergies. Eg, if we just require 40 mpg cars, we get some environmental benefit. But if we tax gasoline and subsidize public transit, some people will buy 40 mpg cars, and some people will choose to live nearer to their jobs to save money, and even the people with 40 mpg cars will drive less, and we get lots more environmental benefit than by just requiring the better cars.
To Julian: Implicit comparisons to Nazi sympathizers is rather uncalled for – so much for keeping it civil. Yes, if we do nothing about reducing greenhouse gases, we might see 100s of millions of people die over the next century. I am NOT saying do nothing. On the other hand, if you could wave a magic wand and stop all burning of fossil fuels tomorrow – I bet 5 billion people would be dead by the end of the year. Very few things in life are as clearly black and white as the evil of the Nazi regime, and it does your cause no good to make false analogies. But, as long as you’ve chosen this analogy: cap-and -traders have figured out a way to smuggle some people out of the death camps and to safety, while working on plans to save everyone down the road. You, on the other hand, won’t accept any plan that doesn’t free everyone simultaneously, and therefore end up saving no one.