China Cap-and-Trade Program Not What the Climate Needs

 

 

First, Cap and Trade has merely been an invitation to fraud and here we discover that what little did work was almost negligible.  Such a system must be international and that means a system of international enforcement.  Obviously this will not happen anytime soon and everyone playing cap and trade is already gaming the system.

Secondly we are entering the real twilight of the whole carbon fuel protocol.  The turn over will be massive and sudden and it will be soon.  I can do it now and others are doing it now.  We are able to readily tap the second tier of matter to release static power to produce ample brake horsepower.  All this with hardware off the shelf.

It will take no more than five years for this to go critical and a total of five years to globally convert.  The speed of conversion will be driven by conversion kits, while not the ideal solution, allows rolling stock to pass through their natural life cycle.

Thus the whole issue of carbon emissions will literally evaporate as hydrocarbon demand is decimated.

China Cap-and-Trade Program Not What the Climate Needs

by   Wenonah Hauter

 http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/25/china-cap-and-trade-program-not-what-climate-needs

President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, walk from the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015, for a private dinner at the Blair House, across the street from the White House.(Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)

The reported move by China to enact a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions will not begin to solve our climate crisis. Pollution trading signifies a dangerous reliance on the market to address a problem that only a decisive move away from fossil fuels and to renewables can truly solve.

Through a system of ‘credits’ and dubious and unverifiable offsets, cap-and-trade programs essentially create a commodity out of pollution, allowing for financial corporations to profit from polluting industries.

Furthermore, scrutiny of such programs show they don’t work. A recent analysis of the Joint Implementation (JI) program enacted under the Kyoto Protocol in Europe found that only 14 percent of the claimed greenhouse gas reduction offsets under the program were even ‘plausible.’ The offset program resulted in the equivalent of about 600 million additional metric tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

It’s ironic this announcement comes as Pope Francis visits the United States. In his encyclical earlier this year, the Pope called carbon trading programs a form of speculation, cautioning they ‘may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors’.

If we truly want to reduce carbon emissions, we must enact policies that truly move our world into a renewable energy future. We must start by banning fracking and extreme energy extraction.


The Paris talks must center around policies that will move us decisively away from fossil fuels, not schemes to allow the financial industry to continue profiting from our climate crisis.