Share
Print
This entry was posted by Joe on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 8:53 am and is filed under Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
RSS
Subscribe by Email
Follow Climate Progress on Twitter
For anyone else who had a hell of a time figuring out what this drawing is of: The thing on the left is the sun, the sheres are planets, and earth is the cinder with a moon orbiting it.
A carbon price that encourages deployment of CO2 mitigation — that is the question. The cinder shows what happens when the price is too low. One way the price gets too low is by allowing offsets instead of real reductions. All sorts of offsets might be great ideas on their own, but that does not mean that they should be allowed as a credit against actual CO2 emissions.
Another way the price gets too low is by giving away so many free allowances that the price goes to zero. And the main way the price gets too low is that modelers are not realistic and honest about the true cost of the technology necessary to implement CO2 emissions reduction. The “clean coal” carolers would like you to believe that the cost is low. So if they exceed their allowances they can just pay the ticket and go to their local PUC for a rate hike. Only when the cost is set high enough that it becomes less expensive to clean up emissions will any real reduction happen.
The gov’t should be making the investments in green energy, transit, legislate efficiency standards for buildings and so forth. The people should stop eating so much cow and bike more.