Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Friday, October 24, 2008 5:20:00 PM
With more permits sloshing around Europe’s carbon market, other polluters like big utilities who have fewer permits than they need are likely to snap up cheaper permits instead of investing now to clean up their operations. (Earlier in the year, European utilties were already burning more coal and buying permits to offset their emissions.)
This is not what environmentalists had in mind when they backed cap-and-trade as a way to ratchet down greenhouse-gas emissions. For the system to really spur change, the carbon price has to be high enough to give an incentive for polluters to install cleaner technologies or move to cleaner fuels. Capturing carbon emissions from coal plants and sticking them underground, for example, will cut emissions but will be expensive. A carbon price below 40 euros a ton tends to make “clean coal” economically unattractive.
The best of intentions, yet just another stupid government program that doesn't work. The sad thing is both
Barack Obama and