Webloggin » Another ‘DUH’ Moment That Is Lost on the American Left

Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work and the Kyoto Protocol is Worthless. Duh.

What a cool idea: Instead of reducing our own carbon emissions, we’ll pay other people to reduce theirs. Win-win!

Not so fast. Carbon offsets — and emissions-trading schemes, their industrial-scale siblings — are the environmental version of subprime mortgages. They both started from some admirable premises. Developing countries like China and India need to be recruited into the fight against greenhouse gases. And markets are a better mechanism for change than command and control. But when those big ideas collide with the real world, the result is hand-waving at best, outright scams at worst. Moreover, they give the illusion that something constructive is being done.

A few fun facts: All the so-called clean development mechanisms authorized by the Kyoto Protocol, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of carbon emissions by … 6.5 days. (That’s according to Roger Pielke at the University of Colorado.) Depressed yet? Kyoto also forces companies in developed countries to pay China for destroying HFC-23 gas, even though Western manufacturers have been scrubbing this industrial byproduct for years without compensation. And where’s the guarantee that the tree planted in Bolivia to offset $10 worth of air travel, for instance, won’t be chopped down long before it absorbs the requisite carbon? -src. Wired Magazine

I wish I could go forward in time, to after we’ve gotten tired of this whole thing and people start to say to each other “how was this supposed to work, anyway?” and someone tries to answer.

You drive a big truck to work, I ride my bike…you don’t pay me to ride my bike, so the planet’s in danger…you start giving me some cash, planet saved. Huh. So the question stands. And it will stand. All those who are cheerleading this thing today, and will be stammering for an answer tomorrow, better start cooking one up right about now. Make it good.

H/T: Pajamas.

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