You would think a law that makes it profitable for companies to reduce pollution would be a good thing. That is, unless you were a conservative. Groups like the Heritage Foundation are attacking America's Climate Security Act of 2007.
Perhaps these people think that cleaning up air pollution is a bad idea. More likely, though, they simply do not want to stop running rough-shod over the environment in the pursuit of making massive amounts of profit.
The Climate Security Act will impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The government will issue permits for emissions. Companies that can find ways to reduce their output of these gases will be allowed to sell their excess permits to other companies that cannot. The scheme, called "cap and trade" will create a financial incentive for companies to clean up their acts.
Like the good, oppositional-defiant children that they are, conservatives are trumpeting the disaster they claim this legislation will bring about: raised costs, the potential for dishonesty, lowered profits and lost jobs. They claim that this kind of system is inappropriate. They stop short of claiming that climate change is hogwash, but only just barely.
The cap and trade system has been in use since 1990 for pollutants associated with acid rain. It works well, and consumers have been able to keep up with any costs that companies have passed on to them. It is hard to imagine why a system that works for sulfur would not work for carbon, but opponents of the legislation claim just that.
Jobs are often lost in one sector while new jobs are made in another. For example, twenty years ago, fewer people were employed in computers and the Internet, while many more were employed in manufacturing. Jobs migrate from one sector to another. While the cap and trade system may cause some loss of jobs in certain industries, green jobs are projected to grow greatly over the next 10 to 20 years.
Dishonest people will find ways to cheat whether they use the cap and trade system or something else. Not instituting a cap and trade system will not make dishonest people honest. Following that logic, the IRS should tax everyone 10% of their income and do away with forms and deductions. That way, no one would cheat on their taxes. Fat chance of that happening.
Profits would only be lowered if the company never attempted to improve its emission standards. In fact, those companies who took aggressive actions to improve would profit handsomely by selling unused emission permits. Those companies who would not or could not clean up their act would eventually go out of business. Think of it as a dinosaur becoming extinct.
Consumers will bear the costs of greenhouse gas pollution, whether the Climate Security Act passes or not. Energy prices are bound to increase naturally because humans are depleting oil and gas supplies. Doing nothing to slow climate change until it is proven beyond a doubt will impose a tremendous cost on all humankind.
Beware of people who claim that doing something to better the environment is too costly. These same people rarely calculate the cost of environmental destruction. Perhaps they do not believe that they can destroy the environment. Perhaps they do not care; however, allowing them to destroy the environment is a bad idea, whether they believe they can do it or not.
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Comments: 46
It's kinda easy to appear in the right, when the opposition is simply vilified. Don't you think it would be a good idea to provide some of the actual arguments those opposing this present (or at least links to them)? I mean, hey, derivatives could have used a bit of opposition, don't you think? As we say, all that glitters is not gold. There may be some devils in the details.
As you wish.
Heritage Foundation, Beware of Cap and Trade Climate Bills.
US EPA, Cap and Trade.
Center for American Progress, Cap and Trade 101.
Wikipedia, Emissions Trading.
Always follow the Holy Path of Profits. It is the one true path.
It will be easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than to pin them down on what they really say...and why they say it, and what it means.
Everyone has a commercial, a blog page, a PR release and always under a different name.
In my spare time, I find out who is funding things like the blog pages...where does their money come from? It is very interesting.
And, intentionally misleading.
Right on, Ann. Keep it open, bring on the dialog.
BS is BS no matter how you spin it. If you just look at "the man" behind the curtain.
Thanks for this article.
Wilka
I spoke to someone in manufacturing this evening. The government is spending millions for a group to do a study about some of the waste/byproducts of that industry and the study originators have come up with a product they can make from the junk left over. Is it possible? Of course. Is it feasible? No, not when they're trying to stay within these rules new. None of the companies and plants are interested in pursuing the project. They could not make a profit.
Well, thank you, but I was more commenting on the essentially "fundamentalist" tone of the article here. These are complex matters, and presenting it as a simple battle between "defiant children" and heroes for the environment, is a bit much, I feel.
Then we have radical conservatives and conservative radicals, both of which persuasions tend to be firearms-oriented.
All I know is, peace & quiet & Nature & clean water/air & healthy soil are good. So that's where my good strong thought energy goes - and that's where my votes go, too.
The funny part is: if we don't shift jobs gradually, through regulations that force companies to do certain things, it will eventually happen anyway. I remember we used to push for government regulation on improvement in cars' efficiency ratings, decrease in size, and the use of alternative energies. We were ignored, even laughed at, and told that the capitalistic economic system would always compensate. This is true: and we are now living through that "compensation". Had we self-imposed those regulations fifteen years ago, we would not be going through much of the difficulty we are today as far as car companies are concerned.
The economic system will compensate, but it does so blindly. This time we might be losing our car manufacturing companies. Who knows what will be lost if we let global warming go too long.
Featured in the Triple Name Club.
An older couple on a fixed income has an old oil-burning furnace. It's not the most efficient, but it gets the job done. Of course they'd like to upgradea to a more efficient model -- maybe natural gas, heat pump or even a more efficient oil burner, but the price is too high and they'll never realize the savings in their lifetime.
Next door, a young couple moves in. Both working with pretty good jobs, no kids yet. The house they bought had an old burner on its last legs, so they moved in knowing that its replacement would be one of the first tasks. They do their homework, find an efficient system with low emissions. Sure, it costs a bit, but they can cover it on their incomes and if they stay in this house 30 years or more as they plan, the system will more than pay for itself.
Are you telling me that the older couple next door should have to pay the younger couple?
This is just an analogy, but I hope you see where I'm coming from.
By they way, I don't deny climate change, I deny that the human factor has been much of an impact and that human action will have little, if any, effect in the big picture.
Dan, your analogy breaks down when you use an older couple with a short lifespan. Corporations effectively live forever. So the couple who won't recoup the price of the more efficient system are not really people; therefore, they should pay the younger couple, or change their system. By the way, even if they would not recoup their costs, their heirs would, when they dissolved the estate, through a better price for the assets.
Any time you liken corporations to people, your logic will fail. Corporations have all the rights of people, but few of the obligations, moral or otherwise. Corporations are not people.
Let's replace the older couple with a short life span to me. No way I can afford to replace my heating/ac system at this time and no reason to, either. It would still take decades to realize enough savings to recoup the investment.
Those with open minds see clearly...those with closed minds see only the four walls they have built around themselves.
:O\
"Conservatives" are always saying it will be disastrous to end the disasters they caused.
Energy prices are bound to increase naturally because humans are depleting oil and gas supplies.
Oh, please don't remind the "conservatives" that reality might bite them in the butt!
Perhaps they do not believe that they can destroy the environment.
As long as they don't say they are destroying the environment, they think that keeps it from happening. Faking reality, as usual.
Now it's true, public utilities would rather not do any of it. It's a big hassle, and a big expense up front, even if we DO get it back. But we'll do it when it becomes law. We always have.
Kinda relies on the tacit assumption that government has some rightful authority to presume to tell industrial firms how much gaseous garbage they are allowed to pollute our property with or poison our lungs and bodies with, don'tcha think?
Nobody has a "right" to pollute. If government would have decided a long time ago to just do the one thing that government has any legitimate purpose for existing to do in the first place -- to preserve and enforce property rights -- the industrial firms would never have been able to socialize the costs of their waste management problems; they would have been forced to invest in non-polluting technology or in methods of operation which recycled or contained their gaseous and liquid waste, and this whole issue would be a non-issue today.
The Supreme Court started passing down rulings in the mid-19th Century, in cases where individual private property rights came up against encroaching industrial waste (from locomotives, coal-powered factories, etc.), stating that the progress of industrial technology was too much in the "public interest," to be inhibited at all by the rights of individuals to not have their property defiled.
In other words, collectivism won out; it was the beginnings of the era where Rule of Law started to give way to the "common good" paradigm.
Now we see the results.
Therefore the following:
1. I’m guessing your plant has combined cycle heat recovery generators, which increases your thermal efficiency to around 60%. If it’s an older plant, it may be less.
2. This means that at 3,200 megawatts you burn at least 18,000 tons/day of coal, possibly much more.
3. Most coal produces at least 10% fly ash, so you generate about 1,800 tons/day of this particulate pollutant. This doesn’t count the dust coming from the coal piles around the plant and the conveyors that carry it from the coal trains to the piles and from the piles to the boilers. I’m betting that, even with your plant’s new pollution recovery equipment, we will be able to see the plant’s plume from tens of miles away.
4. Since burning a ton of coal produces at least 3 tons of carbon dioxide (which we can’t see), your plant generates 54,000 tons of CO2 every day.
I don’t know where the coal for your plant comes from, but I’ll bet the area where it’s mined ain’t pretty. So if your plant is spending $333 million on pollution control equipment, that probably still isn’t enough.
And why shouldn’t the ratepayers be on the hook for the cost of the equipment? It’s they who use the power. As Steve Bachman says, one of the fundamental responsibilities of government is to protect property rights – the air of your downwind neighbors. And if the cost of that protection (i.e. pollution control) makes your plant’s electricity too expensive, at least the ratepayers will be paying the full cost, not just part.
Or do you just pass such vociferous judgment from a position of ignorance?
And how do you know that "these people" will "never get their wish"?
I happen to think that someday, enough people will eventually come around to recognizing what many already have; that statism is, always has been, and always will be a system of exploitation of man by man.
You may be happy in a condition of servitude; doesn't mean everyone always will.
And I would gladly oblige you your happiness. You have every right to subject yourself to the arbitrary whim and discretion of whomever you please. But you do not have any right to insist that those of us who wish to live only according to the Rule of Law, be required to do the same under the threat of initiatory force.
Then go right ahead and sacrifice your own, Gary. It's not a violation of them, if you voluntarily decline to exercise them.
But those of us who wish to retain our rights, are entitled to do so (in the true sense of the word "entitled.")
Every individual has a perfectly valid claim to the defense of their own person and property -- it is our right.
Unless or until you (or any other collectivist/statist) can prove that there are people out there who are intrinsically superior (or "more equal") than everyone else, and thus have a legitimate claim to authority to impose arbitrary compulsions and restrictions on everyone else; and everyone else has some natural or moral obligation to submit to them; until proof of such a claim is forthcoming, then I will assert my own (and proclaim everyone else's) equal, intrinsic, and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.
If we don't change our money we will destroy our society.
Since I’m in the middle of Finals week, I hate to admit, but I must give in to the temptation of leaving a generic comment
But to give it a little personal touch, I added some artwork for you to enjoy!
<font size="1">MySpace Glitters</font>