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Originally Posted by Snakeeye
Some of the goals of Kyoto themselves are worthwhile, as is the benifit given by making an issue out of environmental change. Helping to change our habits - both buisness and consumer - is a good thing.
However, if we wish to achieve Kyoto's true aim, the only thing Canada needs to do is write a $50 billion cheque to China. Kyoto is more about wealth redistribution than it is the environment.
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Yeah, but what that does is it starts to put a cost on pollution.
Go back to when there were no pollution controls. The market requires to minimize costs. Business won't care about pollution because it won't affect their bottom line. But if you start putting a cost per unit of pollution (whatever form you consider - CO2, NO2, ...) now that cost shows up on the balance sheet.
That was the idea of the credits (to intenalize the externalities for ECON people). Once a balance had been reached, decrease the number of credits by a set percentage. Yeah, companies that still want to pollute can still buy the additional credits that they need, btu those credits are more expensive, so, at some point, it will become cheaper to cut down on pollution than buy credits. Or, on the other side of the coin, for some business it will become more profitable to cut pollution ans sell the extra credits.
Business does what it can to satisfy its shareholders. In many/most cases that means increasing profits. Unless you come up with a way of integrating pollution into the profit equation (be it credits, or fines, or licenses or something else) then pollution will be something that everyone would like to do something about but won't.