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Originally Posted by Bobblehead
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.
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I do not disagree. However, this is the problem:
Canada has too much emissions. We have to buy credits for them. Who has extra credits to sell? Oh, hey, look, China does! Nevermind that China pollutes way more than we do. Ok, so we buy credits from China. The environment isnt helped, becuase pollution levels have not changed. Meanwhile, we are supporting a communist and oppressive government because their economy hasnt caught up to ours yet, so they not only get a free pass on their levels of pollution, they also get rewarded.
Great system.
I fully agree that there needs to be costs associated with polluting, but this should not be done on an international level between nations. The Canadian government itself should be taxing the hell out of "dirty" companies, and using the proceeds to offer breaks and subsidies to "clean" companies.
And like White Doors states, it has to go way beyond CO2. There are other environmental problems that are of a far greater immediate concern to humanity.