What do you think of carbon trading?

Carbon trading only seems to be suitable adjunct to the establishment of limits on carbon emissions. I feel that providing an allowable level of carbon emissions provides emitters a "right to pollute" and a subsidy to those who produce the emissions, and is not the right way to proceed. I would much rather place an environmental impact fee on all GHG emissions (and, in fact, on all emissions of all types), with the money used in part to develop lower impacts processes and chemicals, and in part to mitigate the impacts of these emissions. I am aware of such systems of fees in Europe and think that this should be expanded world wide. John

GHG % Trading or Taxes: The utility of carbon trading depends substantially on what percentage of GHGs must be reduced or removed. The lower the amount of residual GHGs allowed to remain in the atmosphere, the fewer returns are likely to come from trading by polluting firms. Firms will only invest in innovation and developing low-cost emissions reduction methods to free up tradeable credits or shares when there will be an active market yielding commensurate profits, which means that many GHG CERs must continue to exist to support trading. If GHGs must be reduced close to zero, which I believe is the case, then the value of trading GHG shares will be slight because ALL firms will have to cut out their emissions almost entirely--whether they are high-cost or low-cost pollution reducers. When only small residual amounts of CO2 and other GHGs can be tolerated, the carbon tax is preferable to a trading scheme because it goes on creating a continuing incentive for emissions reduction until all of the GHG pollution has been eliminated. In short, a trading scheme may (not necessarily will) be superior to a carbon tax when the pollution control target is between 90 and 40 percent, but when the remaining allowable GHG pollution is 20 percent of business-as-usual discharges or even less, then trading schemes lose much of the incentive for innovation and the carbon tax seems better. As for voluntary offset trading by guilt-stricken consumers, that's going to grow very old very soon and it doesn't really reduce GHG emissions in practice. Howard A. Latin Professor of Law Rutgers University School of Law hlatin@speakeasy.net

The tree planting, forest protection and whatever else that is "purchased" with carbon offsets should be done anyway, through aggressive government programs paid for with a carbon tax, not in exchange for carbon emissions. Carbon emissions should be reduced with strict cap and trade programs. Geoff in Montreal

I support carbon trading. It is an effective means for mainstreaming environmental issues.

I much rather prefer a type of carbon tax - this way products are given a level playing field by internalizing the cost of GHG emissions - sustainable products thus getting cheaper compared to unsustainable ones. It promotes technologies that are low in carbon emissions (and other pollutants) by making them the more economical solution for consumers worldwide.

The global enonomy is trading insolvent. It's liabilities exceed it's assets. In order to pay back the creditor (Earth), carbon credits would need to be priced very high indeed.

To use some simple language here--there is really nothing complicated about this issue. The whole concept of carbon trading is not any different from saying: I did not kill my allotted person today, so you go ahead and kill two people--it will even out in the end.

Just because one entity is not polluting to XX level does not mean another entity should be allowed to pollute twice as much! That whole idea is completely ridiculous. The destruction of the environment should not be open for trading. Period.

Every entity should be doing everything in its power to reduce its levels.

JMHO--

If you're not part of the solution,
you are part of the problem.

Carbon trading represents time-killing distraction and dangerous half-measures claiming to address urgent planetary issues. Capitulating to the major corporate desires to limit disruptions to their profit taking around greenhouse gases is tantamount to standing at the helm of a ship on a certain collision course and turning it into a gamble for pulling off a "near miss" instead. Personally, I'm not feeling particularly lucky "banking" on this strategy. The phenomenal capacity for denial on a grand scale stuns me into disbelief at times. If ever there was an occasion to dust-off the precautionary principle and employ it in all matters of social, energy, economic, and environmental policy, it is surely NOW. The vast ice shelves of Antarctica are collapsing, defying our best efforts at scientific prediction -- indicating tipping points have already been reached. What truly is the point in carbon trading other than to recognize it is a hapless bargaining session with the polluters?

Providing polluters with a "cheap way out" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is exactly the policy we should collectively pursue. Spending more than is necessary to achieve any particular level of greenhouse gas reductions simply steals resources from other alternative uses, such as protecting the environment from other threats, supporting education, improving the well-being of poor people, etc. Of course, the saved resources may also go to uses with which you personally disagree, but in general, we are always better off doing more with less, rather than the other way around. Tradeable carbon permits can achieve a given level of carbon reduction at a much lower cost than command-and-control methods instituted by a government bureaucracy. To understand this point, I recommend a careful study of the SO2 allowance system managed by the EPA for reducing SO2 emissions. The EPA website contains very good resources on this program.

Carbon trading?
Surely the imperative is to pollute less, not someone who is poor to sell his or her carbon allowance to a rich person to pollute more, while allowing the curse of emitted Fossil Carbon to cascade down the generations.

Offsetting
I think this is a confidence trick. Planting trees to permit someone else to emit? This depends upon the relative lifetimes of trees and CO2 in the atmosphere. How long does a tree last? Well it would need to last at least as long as atmospheric CO2, or be replaced sequentially. If there is a significant mismatch, then all offsetting does, is to delay the inevitable. We know that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a long time. Estimates vary but one study (Ref. 1) suggests that 33% remains after 100 years, 20 percent after 1000 years, with a long tail. Another study (Ref. 2) suggests that persistence of CO2 is 300 years for 75 percent and 25 percent for 30,000 years. In-fact, it is this ‘long tail’ in both cases that is responsible for much of the warming.

Let’s think about this, don’t these huge time-scales make continued human action rather unlikely, or even impossible? Wouldn’t it be better not to put the fossil CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place?

Could Offsetting work?
Just how many generations of trees would be needed to lock-up the carbon for 1000 years, or 30,000 years in order to allow natural sequestration of the carbon? I don’t know, it depends upon the species. Eucalyptus regnans with maximum average life-span of 400 years, in a forest, with genetically diverse individuals grown naturally from seed. This is not a true average life-span, it is the average maximum life-span of mature ‘standards’, the largest examples of the species! This ignores all the other less lucky and genetically less suited trees that never made it. Perhaps it requires many thousands or hundreds of thousands of seeds to make one ‘standard’ mature giant tree in the forest.

Problems in Practice
Eucalyptus is apparently very popular with offsetting schemes and for reason of economy, these are not typically propagated from seed, but are grown from cuttings, which means that they are all clones. Eucalyptus are disease-prone at the best of times and genetically identical disease-prone trees being grown in plantations, is hardly a recipe for long-term success. Surely, the limiting factor is surely NOT HOW LONG EXCEPTIONAL TREES CAN GROW FOR IN THE WILD! It’s how long REAL trees last in a plantation in practice. In-practice this means survival in a plantation of identical individuals, where any disease will affect all the trees and if it kills one, it will be able to kill all the trees! After-all, these plantations or forests will need to be with us for centuries or even millennia, so the probability of affliction with some pathogen or other will continue, so these forests must be robust and not disease-prone. Surely, trees for offsetting should be grown from seed, more expensive, yes. But the trees need to be genetically diverse and preferably mixed species, making the plantation like a natural forest.

Conclusion
Doesn’t this make offsetting a great deal more expensive in real terms than it is currently? Which makes me believe that offsetting schemes are really making the polluters feel better, but are NEVER GOING TO ACHIEVE THE RESULTS PROMISED, apart from making a few individuals rich for PROMISES THEY CAN NEVER DELIVER.

References
1 The fraction of CO2 remaining in the air, after emission by fossil fuel burning, declines rapidly at first, but 1/3 remains in the air after a century and 1/5 after a millennium (Atmos. Chem. Phys. 7, 2287-2312, 2007).

2 The fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time - David Archer http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf

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BBC World Service
OnePlanet: Carbon Offsetting

More and more people are trying to offset their carbon footprint. Individuals and companies alike are using a range of offsetting schemes to try to cancel out the greenhouse gases they emit. But questions have been raised about how effectively these schemes work. If someone clicks on a mouse and pays a small price, will their carbon emissions really be cancelled out somewhere else in the world? And is there a case for this industry to be more regulated? For One Planet, Becky Milligan has travelled to Tamil Nadu in South India to talk to local farmers working in an international carbon offsetting programme.

Programme Available for seven days from 05 April 2008
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/oneplanet/oneplanet_20080403-1249.mp3

In principle it could work but governments are not smart, strong or honest enough ensure collective and ecological benefits are not outstripped by personal gain. Taxes are far more efficient and workable given the correct transparency and accountability mechanisms for ensuring the revenue goes to offsetting incentives (such as R and D into sustainable energy, incentivizing conservation, and redistribution of life and ecology-saving wealth and sustainable technology to the "bottom billion"). Alas, they do not seem to have the backbone to declare, support and uphold an tax sufficiently robust and flexible to incentivize conservation... which is the reason why we have carbon trading schemes in the first place... Best wishes. Sincerely, John R Ferguson, PhD

The atmosphere belongs to everyone, not to the people who happen to be polluting it today. A cap and trade system rewards today's polluters by giving them perpetual ownership of valuable atmospheric rights that they never had any legitimate claim to.

All of us suffer from pollution, and stand to suffer a great deal from global warming. All of us own the atmosphere in common and if we are to agree to continue to allow pollution of our commons, it is we the people who should be compensated by means of green taxes-- pollution and hydrocarbon taxes that would be used to help offset the problems created by pollution, research more efficient technologies and, at the same time, serve as a disincentive to polluters' emissions and an incentive to transition to non-polluting technologies that would solve the problems long term.

Cap and trade lines the pockets of those who would sell out our atmospheric inheritance and creates incentives for perpetual pollution.

Douglas T. Hawes I agree with Annalee Newitz when she wrote on AlterNet: "Carbon offset fees may be new, but the underlying notion goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church sold wealthy people indulgences to offset the spiritual cost of their sins."