carbon

Today is a watershed day for General Motors — and I’m not talking just about the historic and record-breaking initial public offering marking the company's return to the stock market, and away from majority ownership by the taxpayers.

I've had the good fortune to view the world through a Japanese lens over the past 10 days — specifically, the worlds of green business and clean technology, about which I've come to Japan to speak.

In the first part of this piece, I discussed how the fractured structure of cap and trade is either non-functional or marginally functional.  In the second part, I pointed out how cap and trade, due to its structure, is largely non-responsive to the ethical power of the climate action movement and concerned political leaders. Here I offer a context within which individual effective policy instruments can fit together.

In the first part of this post, I outlined how the components of cap and trade don’t work together to cut emissions.

2. Cap and Trade’s Perverse Ethics Threaten Climate Policy Effectiveness

In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals.  In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid

In part I, I made the general case for cap and trade as an unserious policy framework that inserts extraneous elements into pricing carbon that threaten the whole enterprise. I generated general definitions of seriousness and unseriousness and applied them to cap and trade and its market mechanisms.

In a few days in Copenhagen, world leaders will debate and, we hope, agree upon aggressive targets for humanity’s greatest challenge to date: to avert devastating man-made climate change by transforming our economies’ use of energy and of land while maintaining and improving social welfare for the world’s peoples. We have in the past 250 years proceeded on a course of development which has used fossil energy to replace human and animal muscle power with mechanical energy. 

Friday was dubbed "Business Day" here in Copenhagen — a chance for the corporate community to come together to discuss their considerable role in addressing climate change.

Significantly, business has been all but shut out of the discussions taking place a few kilometers away at the Bella Center, the site of the official UN COP15 negotiations. There, governments from around the world are talking about a slew of critical issues surrounding the commitments the everyone hopes will emerge a week from today from the global community on climate mitigation and adaptation.

In the first part of this post I identified 10 features of cap and trade, the favored climate policy of many policy elites at this point in time, that make the policy ineffectual. I outlined how cap and trade was sold to America and the world based on faulty assumptions as well as its superficial political appeal to the then Clinton Administration.