The world's carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.
In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose.
If you do something good for the environment, does it make any sense
that you should then be entitled to do something bad to the environment?
Of
course it doesn’t. And yet that is basically what corporate polluters
are pushing for as climate legislation makes its way through Congress.
Rather than making required pollution cuts, they want to use “carbon
offsets,” which would essentially allow them to continue their dirty,
polluting business as usual while outsourcing green jobs and cleaner
skies elsewhere…mostly overseas!
In the 1960s, a University of Wisconsin graduate student named
Thomas Crocker came up with a novel solution for environmental
problems: cap emissions of pollutants and then let firms trade permits
that allow them to pollute within those limits.
When
he was a graduate student in the 1960s working to reduce pollutants,
Thomas Crocker devised a cap-and-trade system similar to one being
considered in Congress.
We would support legislation in Congress to address climate change
if it were capable of accomplishing that goal. Unfortunately, despite
the best intentions of its proponents, the bill known as Waxman-Markey
would disable our ability to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions for at
least a decade, hugely increasing the risk of irreversible climate
calamity.
You've heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey climate bill
is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new
market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated,
and dauntingly difficult to monitor.
