Shed no tears – the American House of Representatives has turned back “cap in trade”. Good riddance, I say. I honestly cannot understand how President Obama was so much in favour of it.
The theory was that producers of “green power” would get “green credits” which they could sell to polluters to help them pay environmental assessments. The idea was that funds from polluters would encourage non polluters.
Quite apart for all other considerations this would be a broker’s dream as a whole new market in “Green Credit Futures” would spring up, providing no value to society excepting, of course, to the brokers themselves.
As always, at least part of the problem is the old adage, “the devil is in the details”.
To me an instant “sticking point” is how one defines “green” as in energy. No, let me rephrase that. I have no doubt that the Gordon (Pinocchio) Campbell government would give green points galore to the private power producers, IPPs, … they would call what they do as producing sustainable, green energy thus getting them lots of credits to sell.
Indeed the Campbell government has already defined IPPS as producers of clean, green sustainable energy even though they badly fail on both points.
On the latter point, they are not sustainable because they can only produce power during the run-off so that, depending on the location, they are out of production for 6 months a year of more. Even when there is a run-off, sometimes water levels go down limiting production so that it’s not reliable, not “firm power” thus not sustainable.
But it’s the “clean, green” aspect of this program that is more than just troubling for to come to that conclusion you must be prepared to overlook a number of things:
1. The damage to the river both in the construction of the project and its permanent impact
2. The destruction of fish habitat
3. the impact on the entire ecology of the river thus adversely affecting all plant and animal life dependent on that river
4. The need to clear cut large tracts of trees to provide roads and transmission lines
Every damned fool in the province, except Gordon Campbell, can see that to call such projects “green” is a big fat lie.
There is another little wrinkle here – if a company, say General Electric, were to have interests in both our rivers and, say, the Tar Sands it could pollute the hell out of our river system yet get credits to offset the damage it does in the Tar Sands!
Cap and trade now slinks away cap in hand to the drawing board to think up another way to avoid having to accept their responsibility for pollution and their obligation to get rid of it.
