Climate Policy – Linking Emissions Trading Schemes, Volume 9 issue 4 2009, guest editor Andreas Tuerk, Earthscan 2009
A very narrow view of emissions trading schemes and the “efficiency” of global inter-linkages. This study completely ignores the more efficient tool of taxing carbon, other pollutants and waste while lifting tax burdens from incomes and payrolls. Apparently, the new opportunities for economists in carbon markets which banks see as their next big profit center overwhelms their interest in other ways of moving societies from the Fossil Age to the Solar Age. Thus, the entire focus of the report is inside the box of assumptions that cap and trade schemes are the best way to reduce greenhouse gasses and stabilize the planet’s climate.
An important peek into the mindsets of economists who transpose obsolete economic theories into the carbon-trading field. Ignored are removal of perverse subsidies; direct investments in Solar Age transitions to low carbon re-industrialization as well as the private sectors’ $1.248 trillion invested in growing greener economies since 2007, as reported by the Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® at www.ethicalmarkets.com. Hopefully, setting a global price on carbon can be achieved through mutually agreeable national carbon taxes. Cap and trade schemes have been ruled by the US Congressional Budget Office as taxes-by-another-name. We hope that plain, transparent taxes will replace cap and trade schemes which are excessively complex, bureaucratic and subject to regulatory capture, gaming and fraud. INTERPOL has warned that cap and trade schemes and carbon derivatives trading will become the next global white collar crime wave. – Hazel Henderson