I am very proud that the Sierra Club after much discussion decided to NOT support the Cap and Trade of Carbon pollution

Sam Booher, GA

  "Leading environmentalists" in the U.S. are urging Congress to try

  to curb global warming by creating a massive public-private

  bureaucracy to trade pollution permits amongst polluters, instead of

  simply taxing unwanted emissions.

A DISASTER BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE NATION'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTALISTS

By Peter Montague

This week the U.S. Senate -- arguably the most powerful 100 people on

the planet -- began a debate on a bill to curb global warming.

The N.Y. Times wrote June 3, "The debate, which could last all week,

will force senators to take a stand on some of the most difficult,

expensive and potentially life-altering questions the world will face

in coming decades."

In an editorial May 28, the New York Times had summarized the issue

this way: "The scientific case for action, strong five years ago, is

even more persuasive now. Authoritative assessments from the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other studies, have

left little doubt that the world is heating up, that man-made

emissions are largely responsible and that swift action is necessary

to avoid widespread environmental damage."

The bill being debated in the Senate is known as Lieberman-Warner. It

is being promoted aggressively by Democrat Barbara Boxer. The bill is

co-sponsored by John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

According to the Times June 2, the details of the bill were crafted

by a coalition of "some of the most powerful corporate leaders in

America [who] have been meeting regularly with leading environmental

groups in a conference room in downtown Washington for over two

years..."

So this is a bill written by our "leading environmentalists." The only

"leading environmentalists" named by the Times are staff of the

Natural Resources Defense Council, but we know Environmental Defense

has had a heavy hand in this, too.

The bill would create an enormous new public/private bureaucracy to

curb the emission of global warming gases, chiefly carbon dioxide

(CO2). The system is called "cap and trade." The basic intent is not a

bad one -- to put a price on carbon, which is currently being dumped

into the atmosphere for free.

There are two basic ways to put a price on carbon -- simply tax it, or

wrap it in a large bureaucracy devoted to "cap and trade."

The "cap and trade" idea is to force carbon dioxide (CO2) emitters to

purchase pollution permits, each of which is a legally-enforceable

right to pollute the atmosphere with CO2 -- but only up to a certain

level (the "cap"). If polluters reduce their emissions below their

permitted level, they can sell their unused permits to other polluters

(the "trade"). Every once in a while the total "cap" gets lowered by

the iron hand of government (at least in theory) and the "trade" part

supposedly allows for super-efficient reductions in CO2 emissions:

Those who can reduce their emissions cheaply will do so, and those who

can't will buy extra pollution permits in the open market (thus

worsening pollution in some unfortunate communities, relative to more

fortunate communities). Advocates of "cap and trade" say such a system

will minimize the overall cost to the polluters while ratcheting down

CO2 emissions rapidly enough to avert climate chaos. At least that's

the theory. (It is worth noting that the costs of pollution in the

unfortunate communities [asthma, pulmonary disease, cancer, school

days lost, emergency room visits, etc.] are kept "off the books" in

all these "efficiency" calculations. To some "leading

environmentalists" and their corporate-polluter partners, unfortunate

communities have a value of zero.)

You won't read about it in the New York Times, but there are serious

mainstream critics of the "cap and trade" approach who say it is

neither economically efficient nor workable. For example, the

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- Congress's own office of economic

analysis -- published its study three months ago concluding that:

** A carbon tax -- not cap and trade -- is the "most efficient" method

to address global warming, both in limiting economic costs and for

achieving environmental benefits.

What is a carbon tax?

A carbon tax is a tried-and-true way of putting a price on carbon

emissions. Such a tax can be remarkably simple: you weigh the amount

of carbon-containing fuel (coal, oil, or natural gas) as it comes out

of the ground (or as it is comes off the ship), calculate the tax per

ton of carbon, and collect the tax. End of story. The cost if the tax

gets passed along to the purchaser via the market. Or, with

considerably more effort, you could tax carbon directly at the point

of purchase. Either way, you don't have to measure anyone's emissions

-- an exceedingly complex and costly procedure providing untold

opportunities for thousands of polluters to fudge the data. The tax

has an additional advantage: no one gains a legally enforceable "right

to pollute." With a tax, the nation's electric utilities -- and

cement, aluminum and steel companies -- couldn't ever be able to go to

court to try to stop government from taking away their "right to

pollute," a property right they could claim to own because they

purchased it with good money.

On its face, a cap and trade program is immensely complex. As Robert

Samuelson writes in the June 9 issue of Newsweek, "The chief

political virtue of cap-and-trade -- a hugely complex scheme to reduce

greenhouse gases -- is its very complexity." Within all the complexity

comes endless opportunity for shenanigans. (The BBC reported this

week how the carbon trading scheme built into the Kyoto Treaty is

being gamed by polluters at considerable profit to themselves but no

benefit to planet Earth.)

In a cap and trade program, someone has to sell or auction (or give

away free) the pollution permits each year. Someone else has to keep

track of who has received how many permits and who has sold how many

of their permits to whom. (Permits can be "banked" and used years

later, so someone must pay close attention.) Someone else has to

measure all the tens of thousands of permitted CO2 emissions to make

sure they aren't exceeding permitted levels. Buying and selling rights

to pollute will create an enormous private bureaucracy -- a trading

exchange -- supported by an army of bankers, lawyers, engineers,

accountants, analysts, ad men, publicists, lobbyists, sales people,

hucksters and camp followers. The first year of a "cap and trade"

program is estimated to create a new "market" in pollution rights

worth a $220 billion. A market worth $220 billion per year is as large

as the market for computer processors. There's real money to be made

here by the clever and the unscrupulous. The British journal New

Scientist reported in April that "what began as a niche market is

now attracting major financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley,

Credit Suisse, and Barclays Capital..." plus JP Morgan Chase and

others. In other words, the new carbon market is being created by the

same people who created the ever-deepening mortgage lending disaster.

Have they shown that they have society's best interests at heart, or

have they shown a cruel focus on making money, no matter the cost to

others? It's a fair question.

New Scientist summarized the root question this way: "As Nicholas

Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, puts it: climate

change is 'the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.' The

question now is whether capitalism is able to make amends. Can it

provide a mechanism that rewards people for reducing their carbon

emissions instead of increasing them? Or will it simply give big

polluters a way of dodging their responsibilities?"

And New Scientist ends its devastating critique of "cap and trade"

with a stark warning about the consequences of manipulation and

deception within the carbon trading market: "With Enron, it was the

shareholders who suffered. But if the atmosphere continues to be

filled with greenhouse gases and the planet's climate crashes as Enron

did, no one will be spared."

On May 4th, two attorneys working for U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency [EPA] wrote an "open letter to Congress" explaining why "cap

and trade" can't work. Attorneys Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel each

have roughly two decades of experience in environmental enforcement,

and Zabel has extensive experience with prior cap and trade programs

run by EPA. Williams and Zabel told Congress that a "cap and trade"

system "is an open invitation to fraud and would significantly delay

reductions [in carbon emissions]." They went on to list (and document)

half a dozen other reasons why a "cap and trade" program will be

nothing more than a gift to the financial industry and the polluters

but will not reduce CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert climate

chaos.

So the U.S. Senate is debating how to curb global warming, but is

restricting the debate to a single approach -- "cap and trade" -- an

approach that was devised by the corporate polluters themselves,

locked in a room for two years with their house environmentalists.

"Cap and trade" sets up a system that offers endless opportunities to

game the system and make even more money by burning fossil fuels,

while claiming to be curbing global warming fast enough to avert

climate chaos. By the time the system has matured and we learn that it

did not work, the billionaires created by the system will be living

comfortably in the globally-warmed mountains of Switzerland while the

rest of us are learning to deal with more and bigger Katrinas,

creeping inundation of all the world's coastal cities, and widespread

famine from crop failures caused by drought.

This disaster is being created right before our eyes by the "leading

environmentalists" in the United States. Pulitzer-prize winning

journalist Ross Gelbspan reports in the Boston Globe that at least

one leading environmental organization in the U.S. -- Environmental

Defense -- is planning to make money brokering carbon trades. Let's

point out for the record that many, many environmentalists in the U.S.

oppose this dangerous, self-serving gamble with the future of the

planet. Two collaborations of environmental justice advocates

(originating on the East and West coasts of the U.S.) have taken

unequivocal positions against carbon trading. Clearly, a national (and

global) climate justice movement is emerging. Let's hope it gathers

momentum in time to stop the "leading environmentalists" in the U.S.

from creating an irreversible catastrophe.