On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 7:20 AM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: > > Personally, I think there's so much uncertainty (ignorance) about the > nature and consequences of these policies that I'm more than willing > to allow for political experimentation. For good reason: these > policies have not been tried ever, or at least at any scale > commensurable to the problems we face. I say, let's try all of the > above -- regulation, taxes/subsidies, cap'n trade, etc., whatever > combination may be politically available, to internalize at least some > of the environmental (i.e. social labor) costs in the choice of > production and consumption composition and levels.
Cap-and-Trade when it comes to greenhouse gas emission reductions has been tried on a fairly large scale - low targets but covering large economies. And it has failed. Also there are pretty sound reasons why it can never work. The point I made about why a carbon tax can never be more than reinforcement applies even more strongly to cap-and-trade. We can't measure emissions at the level of one automobile or one factor or one building with much precision or acccuracy. That applies even if we require permits at the extraction and import level of fossil fuel. One is that even if we have two identical barrels of oil or whatever, the effect on the climate varies based how that oil is burned, on how much black carbon is released, now much methane is produced during burning, how much N2O is produced during combustion. Plus there are variations in actual carbon content of fuel - even between two barrels of the same grade of oil, two tons of the same grade of coal and so on. Plus there are variations in leakage and spillage during extractions, including methane releases. This is bad enough in a carbon tax situation, but at least the sign is almost certain to be right. But once you do trading these variations can end up with the sign being wrong, losing money by reducing emisisons or making money by increasing them.. There are a lot of other problems with cap and trade, but I would say this alone is decisive. Again, we do know that if the means is easier to measure than the ends, this implies that regulations and public investment (so called command-and-control) are preferable to market means. I still think carbon fees have roles to play as reinforcement. But cap-and-trade, we are not that ignorant. We know enough to know that cap-and-trade is useless and counterproductive. My personal opinion is that Public investment is the primary means, "command and control" regulation the secondary one, and carbon fees tertiary reinforcement. One can argue for different priorties between these. Some would prioritize carbon fees, and make public investment and c and c regulation secondary. Some would oppose carbon fees entirely, but there is no reasonable argument at this point to be made for cap-and-trade. > > I agree with Gar, any policy is likely to be distorted in practice -- > if not fully diverted towards reinforcing the crap that exists -- by > the fundamental asymmetries of wealth ownership and power. This is > capitalism: a gigantic black hole that warps everything we do while we > are in it. It goes with the territory, and it's not an argument > against supporting the thrust of these measures, as imperfect as they > may prove to be. -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
