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After Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman (I had watched Foreman train and like most others, hoped he wouldn't literally kill Ali) I never again bet against him. FIRE will shock and amaze us in its 'death throes'. Fees on water and air are in sight.
How Wall Street Will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet
Carbon Cap and Trade
By HEATHER WILLIAMS and PAUL BAKER
Every year, sometime around July 15th, the good people of Staunton, Illinois gather by the Staunton Senior High School for what has become an annual point of pride for the community, as flocks of bicyclists from around the country gather at the starting line to begin a 30-mile road race.
The course scenery is pleasant but unremarkable, winding through cornfields and gallery forests in the hilly farm country of southern Illinois.
What brings hundreds of competitors here every year is the competition’s unusual mechanism for tabulating individual scores. At this race, competitors must stop twice during the 30-mile course at break stations where they are offered glazed donuts. For every donut that competitors consume, five minutes are deducted from their scores.
Thus, for even mediocre riders who also really good donut eaters, the ride offers an offset structure that makes them champions.
Offsets, when measured not in donuts but in carbon equivalents, have a similar correspondence to real-time facts. The problem, however, is that current climate change legislation being drafted in Washington, DC today is anchored in a scheme little more sophisticated than that offered by the glazed treat-loving architects of the Tour de Donut. And that is where the rubber meets the road.
Meet Lieberman-Warner, the sequel (1)
This year, Democrats in the United States Senate and House of Representatives have promised drafts of legislation that they claim will address catastrophic threats to global ecosystems, water supplies, and built environments. What nearly all have rushed to agree on publicly is that systems designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases must be market-based and pro-industry, and focused primarily on creating so-called “green jobs.” This crowd-pleasing language, however, masks the accounting mechanisms by which such legislation will achieve reductions. Much like the donut-eating scheme in the Staunton bicycle race, greenhouse gas reductions in market-based regulation or so-called “cap and trade” schemes are likely to be reductions that look a whole lot better on paper than they do on tree ring data indicating total atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulation.
On March 31st, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chariman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep Ed Markey of Massachusetts released a draft bill that was immediately attacked by conservatives and dismissed quietly by neoliberals in the Obama camp as going too far too fast on emissions reductions. The bill called for a 20 percent decrease in emissions by 2020, compared with 15 percent in the White House outlines. The bill is touted as taking bold steps to address rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but the fine print is what will cement the future course of U.S. industrial development to coal and nuclear power, and probably to the final evisceration of the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act among others.
The bill will do this in two ways: first, by subsidizing research and development on carbon sequestration technologies that are unlikely to durably store large amounts of greenhouse gases in the best of circumstances, and will never in a million years be cost-efficient. Second, the Waxman-Markey system and its equivalents will put in motion a climate derivatives market so big and so risky that the world may end up being forced to choose between propping up investment banks that have crawled back to life trading financial instruments based in fictional emissions reductions, or in actually regulating industry and mining and physically restricting the flow of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
If the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, a bill circulating in the Senate last year, or the currrent Waxman-Markey bill are any guide to this year’s coming attractions, climate change legislation from leading Democrats is likely to be based large giveaways of money-generating polluting rights to large industries, and on offsets, or low-priced carbon credits that polluters use to have other firms supposedly sequester carbon for them. As detailed in recent works by Larry Lohmann, Michael Wara and David Victor, Pat McCully (2) and others, experience in the European Union has shown such schemes create perverse incentives for the worst polluters and the shrewdest offset dealers to increase emissions in the short run and to game the trading schemes in the long run.
A simpler alternative that is subject to far less political manipulation is a carbon tax. In a political landscape where new taxes are verboten, a simple carbon levy is off the table among Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration. This is a shame. A cap-and-trade program would function like a heavy sales tax to ordinary citizens but would not function to readily redirect capital in a green direction. Instead, if big industry has it way, tens of billions of dollars in trading revenues would quickly disappear into the pockets of large industries, while coal plants, corn ethanol, and mega-dams are built at record rates.
A tax policy based on readily verifiable carbon emissions at the point of production or distribution, on the other hand, would send clear and rapid price signals to consumers. Prices at market would then reflect the total upstream carbon emissions attached to goods and services. This far more tangible market-based system would work rapidly and would remain fairly impervious to political manipulation. It would also be far easier to assess the effect of the tax on its intended target. Much as GDP growth has long been considered the economy’s master variable, the climate’s press-ready variable from a carbon tax would be total greenhouse gas emissions measured in carbon equivalents.
Complete article: http://www.counterpunch.org/williams04152009.html
How Wall Street Will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet
Carbon Cap and Trade
By HEATHER WILLIAMS and PAUL BAKER
Every year, sometime around July 15th, the good people of Staunton, Illinois gather by the Staunton Senior High School for what has become an annual point of pride for the community, as flocks of bicyclists from around the country gather at the starting line to begin a 30-mile road race.
The course scenery is pleasant but unremarkable, winding through cornfields and gallery forests in the hilly farm country of southern Illinois.
What brings hundreds of competitors here every year is the competition’s unusual mechanism for tabulating individual scores. At this race, competitors must stop twice during the 30-mile course at break stations where they are offered glazed donuts. For every donut that competitors consume, five minutes are deducted from their scores.
Thus, for even mediocre riders who also really good donut eaters, the ride offers an offset structure that makes them champions.
Today, most winners gain their competitive edge from their stomachs and not their legs. With top competitors in recent years stuffing down over 20 donuts each, winners now post negative times. That is to say, on the books of the people who run this competition, the laureates of the Tour de Donut have finished their races before they began.
To the best of our knowledge the Tour de Donut has still not drawn any theoretical physicists to Staunton to test whether competitors stopping at break stations are passing through wormholes in the space-time continuum. This is probably because scholars of relativity and quantum gravity are doubtful that eating donuts will make atomic clocks run backward, even in rural Illinois at daytime temperatures exceeding 28° C. Physicists’ stubborn absence from the event suggests that they understand offsets to be a meso-level construct for a rule-bound game rather than a measurable dimensional phenomenon. Offsets, when measured not in donuts but in carbon equivalents, have a similar correspondence to real-time facts. The problem, however, is that current climate change legislation being drafted in Washington, DC today is anchored in a scheme little more sophisticated than that offered by the glazed treat-loving architects of the Tour de Donut. And that is where the rubber meets the road.
Meet Lieberman-Warner, the sequel (1)
This year, Democrats in the United States Senate and House of Representatives have promised drafts of legislation that they claim will address catastrophic threats to global ecosystems, water supplies, and built environments. What nearly all have rushed to agree on publicly is that systems designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases must be market-based and pro-industry, and focused primarily on creating so-called “green jobs.” This crowd-pleasing language, however, masks the accounting mechanisms by which such legislation will achieve reductions. Much like the donut-eating scheme in the Staunton bicycle race, greenhouse gas reductions in market-based regulation or so-called “cap and trade” schemes are likely to be reductions that look a whole lot better on paper than they do on tree ring data indicating total atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulation.
On March 31st, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chariman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep Ed Markey of Massachusetts released a draft bill that was immediately attacked by conservatives and dismissed quietly by neoliberals in the Obama camp as going too far too fast on emissions reductions. The bill called for a 20 percent decrease in emissions by 2020, compared with 15 percent in the White House outlines. The bill is touted as taking bold steps to address rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but the fine print is what will cement the future course of U.S. industrial development to coal and nuclear power, and probably to the final evisceration of the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act among others.
The bill will do this in two ways: first, by subsidizing research and development on carbon sequestration technologies that are unlikely to durably store large amounts of greenhouse gases in the best of circumstances, and will never in a million years be cost-efficient. Second, the Waxman-Markey system and its equivalents will put in motion a climate derivatives market so big and so risky that the world may end up being forced to choose between propping up investment banks that have crawled back to life trading financial instruments based in fictional emissions reductions, or in actually regulating industry and mining and physically restricting the flow of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
If the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, a bill circulating in the Senate last year, or the currrent Waxman-Markey bill are any guide to this year’s coming attractions, climate change legislation from leading Democrats is likely to be based large giveaways of money-generating polluting rights to large industries, and on offsets, or low-priced carbon credits that polluters use to have other firms supposedly sequester carbon for them. As detailed in recent works by Larry Lohmann, Michael Wara and David Victor, Pat McCully (2) and others, experience in the European Union has shown such schemes create perverse incentives for the worst polluters and the shrewdest offset dealers to increase emissions in the short run and to game the trading schemes in the long run.
A simpler alternative that is subject to far less political manipulation is a carbon tax. In a political landscape where new taxes are verboten, a simple carbon levy is off the table among Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration. This is a shame. A cap-and-trade program would function like a heavy sales tax to ordinary citizens but would not function to readily redirect capital in a green direction. Instead, if big industry has it way, tens of billions of dollars in trading revenues would quickly disappear into the pockets of large industries, while coal plants, corn ethanol, and mega-dams are built at record rates.
A tax policy based on readily verifiable carbon emissions at the point of production or distribution, on the other hand, would send clear and rapid price signals to consumers. Prices at market would then reflect the total upstream carbon emissions attached to goods and services. This far more tangible market-based system would work rapidly and would remain fairly impervious to political manipulation. It would also be far easier to assess the effect of the tax on its intended target. Much as GDP growth has long been considered the economy’s master variable, the climate’s press-ready variable from a carbon tax would be total greenhouse gas emissions measured in carbon equivalents.
Complete article: http://www.counterpunch.org/williams04152009.html