In response to his comment on my last post, I agree with Daniel that Kyoto isn’t the way to go. It didn’t include developing countries such as China and India, and any successful international framework must include them. The other major flaw is how it implements a cap and trade system. Simply put, it isn’t a truly market-based system – it excludes certain sectors and allowed government to set the price of tradable carbon credits.
You won’t find me advocating Kyoto, but I do believe the best idea in the whole Kyoto plan was the idea of cap and trade. Little known is the fact that the US got the treaty-writers to include it. If done the right way – the American way, the way it was conceptually outlined nearly 30 years ago by George Schultz – cap and trade has been proven successful. It is already in use today to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that contribute to acid rain, and it has done so at a small fraction of the estimated cost.
And a point about Darfur I should have made in my original post. I feel climate change exacerbates the problem there, and could cause similar problems elsewhere. But make no mistake: The crisis there is the product the fact that the Janjaweed were tasked to kill by Khartoum.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Cap and Trade, International Environmental News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
