However 723(c) says if the company fails to pay the penalty, then the Administrator sets up a repayment scheme that is 1X the current market value. The Administrator can determine if this is to be payed the next year or over a series of years.

Perhaps I’m misreading subsection (c) and the repayment must be from available alllowances, in which case we still have a cap in place (as has been discussed above), but I wanted clarification. Anyone have a good handle on this language?

If there is a better forum for this question, please let me know.

[JR: Not correct. Even Hansen is relying on peak oil to deal with conventional oil in his 350 ppm strategy, as I've blogged. My response was a strictly about peak oil dealing with oil, not CO2.]

2) The fuel efficiency of car is NOT a guarantee to cut the fuel consumption; people will also have to drive less (or at least not to drive more), and the price signal will be needed for this purpose (and will bring financial ressources to struggle GW and help poor people)

[JR: This point contradicts your point #1. Peak oil is what gives you the price signal. BTW, you seem unaware that American shave been driving less for a few years now, even before the huge price spike.]

You surely have blogged on this previously, but even if it will harm you, it woud be greatly appreciated to re open the topic.

I still hope that a smart president as Obama will get this right and engage his country on the right solution as proposed by people like Jim Hansen or Tom Friedman (your advertiser in chief!)
Regards.

How can you imagine that cap and trade will limit our consumption of gas for our cars by any manageable quota? The only way such a limit will occur is by the rise of the gas price. Instead of the price rise being trigerred by the variation of a CO2 market, it would be much more clear and pretictable that this rise will be charted by a tax ramp up (the oil price having its own variations).

[JR: That is why 1) Obama has adopted aggressive fuel economy standards and 2) the Waxman-Markey bill has a big push toward plug-in hybrids and electric cars. That said, it is peak oil that will drive down oil consumption, not climate legislation. I have blogged on that previously.]

http://energytomorrow.org/ Energy_Rhetoric_vs_Reality.aspx

W-M will do very little practically to slow the momentum for increasing climate change any time soon, and soon is all that matters given the approaching tipping points. It’s main value is that it breaks through a political barrier that has seemed quite solid until recently. If breaking that barrier makes for greater possibilities in the near future, it will be worth it. Maybe it would be better to wait till 2010 if we can get qa better bill. But maybe W-M will also get us a better bill.

Still – it is easy to verify. Just count the full container ships as they arrive and the empty ones as they leave.

China produces nearly all of the coal they burn, so the world can’t even get a good handle on their actual consumption, and then calculate their emissions from that number. I doubt we could do much better on their oil and NG use.

This is the big problem I see in any international agreement: Verification. I’ve been saying for some time that we’re likely headed toward a period when scientists will say that based on the growth in atmospheric CO2 from year N to N+1, world emissions must have been X, which is larger than the sum of all the reported country-level emissions. How do we figure out who’s lying with enough certainty to impose trade or other penalties?