These people are nuts:
Some of Europe\’s largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.
Ten steel and cement companies have amassed 240m carbon pollution permits from generous allocations, according to a report by Sandbag, the carbon trading thinktank, seen by the Guardian.
The free permits, granted to companies with a market value of €4bn (£3.5bn), can be sold or kept for future use. The European commission estimates that the entire energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7bn-€12bn by the end of 2012.
\”More and more businesses see that Europe\’s future lies in a highly efficient economy with low pollution,\” Baroness Worthington, Sandbag\’s founding director, said. \”But a small group of carbon fat-cat companies are trying to stop this, in spite of making billions from a windfall of free pollution permits.\”
So, what they want to do is cut the number of permits in existence.
Their logic being that recession, or perhaps increased efficiency, has meant that there are too many permits and thus the price is too low and thus we must cut the number of permits to increase the price.
Except this is crazed lunacy.
We want people to reduce their emissions so that they can sell off the extra permits. That\’s the whole point, to provide people with a method of making a profit from reducing emissions.
So, if they do reduce emissions and thus look to make a profit, we\’re going to encourage them to reduce emissions in the future by confiscating their profits, are we?
They\’re cretins. Shoot them.
Sorry, Tim, you’re the cretin, at least on this subject.
Will you please, for the love of God and Man, re-examine your fundamental premises, that AGW exists and that it is bad?
Try this reasoning for starters: Global cooling – 5 miles of ice over northern Europe, Canada, much of the USA, Siberia, …billions die. Global warming – not much really, probably good, Roman warm period and all that.
I note that you are starting to see that those pushing the whole AGW-carbon credits-“emissions are bad” thingy are total lying, thieving, cretins. Try, try, very hard, to accept the implications of that. I know it’s embarrassing to admit having been gulled, but the time is here.
In general I am in favour of con-men, the long con and the short, for it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money. However, when smart guys like you get suckered, you take a lot of fools with you, and my bloody costs go up.
Tim,
I think the key part is “Some of Europe‘s largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.”
When the permit scheme was incoming the politicians needed to buy support for it. Vested interests naturally lobbied against it. Their resistance was overcome with money. In a daft short term move they threw an unsustainable stream of revenue at producers of CO2. Had they been less generous they would have had less support but created a longer term kick to the market.
A knee jerk in one direction and now a knee jerk in the opposite direction, and the politicians will paint both moves as positive – first in saving the planet and second in bashing carbon fat cats (which they created) – while denying they may have made a mistake in the first place.
If you want to reduce the intromission of carbon into the biosphere, the single worst scheme you could possibly have is an “emissions” scheme. It is simply the wrong place in the economy to apply the crowbar.
If you think this problem needs rationing, fine. Fair enough. But don’t go around ladling out money to people for not doing something, then expect to have any hope of meaningfully measuring the difference between how much of it they aren’t doing and how much of it they wouldn’t have done in an alternative reality.
To illustrate, try attempting to calculate how many cornflakes the UK population didn’t eat yesterday. It can’t be done, can it? It’s a meaningless statistic.
But hey, I don’t eat cornflakes anyway. So if you want to pay me for not eating cornflakes, please send the cheque to the usual address. I’ll be happy to not eat as many cornflakes as you like.
The credits should never have handed out any for free in the first place. Carbon credits and cap and trade only really work if all the credits are auctioned off.
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