From another viewpoint, and a good one.
An excerpt.
Another view: Pollution trading isn't only solution
By Curtis Moore - Special to the BeePublished 12:00 am PDT Monday, September 11, 2006
Curtis Moore is responding to The Bee's Aug. 25 editorial "Highly climactic / Sides need to give on global warming bill." Moore is an author and international consultant based in McLean, Va. He also coedits and publishes the nonprofit Health & Clean Air newsletter, which can be found at healthandcleanair.org.
Because I've worked in the environmental field for nearly 30 years, 11 of them as Republican counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, I follow California developments closely. Usually they're encouraging, but not so with the uncritical support of pollution trading as a way to curb global warming, evidenced by your editorial, which stated:
"Pollution trading programs have effectively reduced acid rain and other emissions across the country... ."
Despite this common belief, trading simply doesn't work, if the measure of success is whether health and environmental objectives are met, not whether polluters save money. Lakes and soils in the Northeast remain acid, for example, and probably will be so for another half-century.
Other trading programs have included leaded gasoline, which meant the United States required 25 years to finish a job China did in three, and the Los Angeles RECLAIM smog program failed miserably and was rife with fraud.
Carbon cap-and-trade in Europe is now on the ropes because industries lied about their pollution. In the words of a Bloomberg Report, trading there "is failing to meet the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-dioxide emission standards. Rather than help protect the environment, the trading system has led to increases in electricity prices of more than 50 percent and record profits."
The popularity of trading is due in part to disenchantment with government in general and regulation in particular. The choice, however, is not between trading and rules, because there are market mechanisms that have succeeded fabulously.
The Swedes, for example, cornered the global market for low-sulfur fuel with a "feebate" -- taxing high sulfur products and rebating the money to low sulfur versions. Not one dime stuck to government's hands. Japan produced the world's cleanest refineries and power plants by requiring companies to compensate nearly 100,000 victims of air pollution. The U.S. "Superfund" revolutionized the chemical industry's previously cavalier approach to its toxic wastes by requiring companies to pay every last cent of cleanup costs, whether they were negligent or not. Germany steers consumers toward clean products with its "Blue Angel" labels.
