James Hansen - the world's leading climate scientist fighting against global warming - told Amy Goodman from Democracy Now that cap and trade not only won't reduce emissions, it may actually increase them:
"The problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased. Before the Kyoto Protocol, global emissions of carbon dioxide were going up one-and-a-half percent per year. After the accord, they went up three percent per year.
Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are also against cap and trade, as is the head of California's cap and trade program for the EPA."
Hansen also told Goodman that most economists say that cap and trade won't work:
" * The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won't work for global warming
* European criminal investigators have determined that there is a tremendous amount of fraud occurring in the carbon trading market. Indeed, organized crime has largely taken over the European cap and trade market.
* Former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro says that the proposed cap and trade law "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."
* Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading. In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.
* One the largest boosters for cap and trade invented credit default swaps - which were supposed to increase financial stability, but instead were a large part of the reason that the world economy crashed last year."
James Hansen is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He also teaches at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and has published his first book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what’s meant by “cap and trade.”
JAMES HANSEN: Cap and trade, they attempt to put a cap on different sources of carbon dioxide emissions. They say there’s a limit on how much a given industry in a country can emit. But the problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play an excerpt of what the Australian scientist Tim Flannery says. He was speaking on Democracy Now! earlier this year in defense of cap and trade.
TIM FLANNERY: Look, cap and trade, by itself, is not enough, but it is essential in terms of these international negotiations. And one way of showing that is to look at the alternatives. Just say the US went with a carbon tax. That would leave the President in a position where he’d be going to Copenhagen and saying, “Look, we’ve got a carbon tax, but we’ve got no idea really what it’s going to do in terms of our emissions profile.” So, countries would just say, “Well, what are you actually pledging to? What are you—how are you going to deal with your emissions?” You know, the only method, really, to allow countries to see transparently what other countries intend to do and then share the burden equally is through a cap-and-trade system. So it’s not enough to deal with emissions overall, but it is an essential prerequisite for any global deal on climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: The Australian scientist Tim Flannery. Dr. Hansen?
JAMES HANSEN: Well, Tim is a great biologist, but he hasn’t looked at the data on emissions and the effect of a cap with offsets. In fact, it does not decrease emissions. And that’s one reason, in my book, I say that I’m going to update the graphs every month and every year, just showing what’s really happening, because, in fact, you have to actually decrease the emissions.
And the only way that will happen is if the price of the fossil fuels is gradually rising so that the alternatives—energy efficiency, renewable energies, nuclear power, the things that can compete with fossil fuels—begin to be cost-competitive. That’s the only way it will work."
To catch the rest of the interview with James Hansen go to:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/22/leading_climate_scientist_james_hansen_on
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