2009-12-04

Cap-and-Trade is Fatally Flawed. Commentary by Daphne Wysham, HuffPost, December 1, 2009. "President Barack Obama's announcement that the U.S. will offer an unprecedented pledge to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020 at the Copenhagen climate talks in December may seem impressive at first blush. But look closely, and you'll see the 'cuts' he has offered are, at least in the short-term, essentially meaningless. The reason is twofold. First: The cuts start from a 2005 baseline, when the baseline the scientific community has put forward is 1990. As a result, these cuts translate to a mere 4% below 1990 levels by 2020, when what we need is a 25-40% cut in U.S. emissions below 1990 levels by 2020. Reason number two: Even these measly cuts could all be met by the buying and selling of an invisible, unverifiable, entirely manmade commodity: the carbon offset.Obama's offer of cuts is based on the cap and trade proposals that have passed the House and are moving through the Senate. Both versions allow polluters to meet their pollution targets by actual cuts or by trading excess pollution with another polluter who has exceeded his targets. Carbon offsets go one step further and allow polluters to carry on polluting so long as they pay a small penance for every ton of CO2 they emit above their cap. Carbon offsets are attractive to polluters because they are, in general, a cheaper price to pay than actual cuts or traded emissions.

"To help clarify the complicated world of cap and trade, we have joined forces with The Story of Stuff Project and Free Range Studios to produce a short, 10-minute film called The Story of Cap and Trade, which attempts to simplify the flaws in this approach and suggests better ways of moving forward." Daphne Wysham is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where she is the founder and co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network.

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