Transcript Presentation on Cap-and-Trade

The Developing Debate Over GG
Controls
The President-Elect, Nov. 18, 2008, video
address to meetings on climate change
• “Delay is no longer an option.
… Denial is no longer an
acceptable response.”
• “Now is the time to confront
this challenge once and for
all.”
What the campaign promised:
• Reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions 80 Percent by
2050
• Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.
• The Obama-Biden cap-and-trade policy will require all pollution
credits to be auctioned, and proceeds will go to investments in a
clean energy future, habitat protections, and rebates and other
transition relief for families.
• Make the U.S. a Leader on Climate Change.
• Obama and Biden will re-engage with the U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) -- the main international
forum dedicated to addressing the climate problem. They will also
create a Global Energy Forum of the world’s largest emitters to
focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues.
John Bonine, University of Oregon
• “If cap-and-trade means mostly planting trees,
in exchange [for] exceeding the caps, we are
toast.”
• “[In addition to a global cap, we should enact] a
US cap that allows no purchasing of credits
outside the US”
▫ “I just don’t trust that reductions claimed
elsewhere will materialize in a world with
insufficient enforcement”
▫ That would force the US to develop technologies
and strategies to control GG
Wil Burns
• “A carbon tax is a far superior mechanism to cap
and trade … but it probably remains one of the
third rails of politics”
• Cap-and-trade has “very little capability of
controlling distributional outcomes”
• “We need to develop stringent standards, e.g., no
credit for tree planting in non-tropical regions”
Prof. Lesley McAllister, San Diego
• “[C]aps in existing cap-and-trade programs have
been ‘over-allocated,’ with caps set at levels that
require few if any reductions from business-asusual emissions.”
• Caps should require reductions “at least as great
as those that would be achieved by mandating
the use of feasible emissions control
technologies.”
Prof. David Hodas, Widener
• “[A]bandon the Kyoto model for a global cap.
Then forestry can be a real, verifiable form of
sequestration, not a counterfactual game of
baseline poker.”
• “[T]o be enticing hosts for projects, developing
nations will need to improve their rule of law
generally, so that they have a stable set of rules
and institutions to support significant
investment.”
Emmanuel Kisimbazi, Maryland
• “My concern is that different developing
countries are at different levels of development.
… South Africa is not at the same level of
development as Uganda my country. How do
you develop a legal regime to address the two
countries?”
• “[M]ost countries, especially in Africa, have
recently developed environmental laws that can
deal with forestry management issues but the
most crucial challenge is their implementation.”
TNC experience with forest carbon
under the Kyoto Protocol
Allow regulated sources to use
international forest carbon credits for
compliance
• Could generate billions of dollars for protecting
endangered forests in the tropics and elsewhere
Forest carbon legislation has to
address three issues
• Additionality—make sure the emissions
offset/reduction is not something that would
have happened anyway
• Leakage—make sure you aren’t just shifting
GG-emitting activities such as deforestation to
another site
• Permanence—are restored/protected forests
likely to remain intact indefinitely?
Dimensions of the problem
• More than 37 million acres of tropical forest—an
area larger than New York State—are lost each
year.
• In many developing countries, deforestation is
the largest source of emissions.
• The IPCC projects that 30% of Earth’s plants and
animals will be at increasing risk of extinction by
century’s end with “business as usual”
• Globally, about 20% of GG emissions are
associated with forest losses.
There are good arguments for
including Forest Carbon—can we solve
the legal and institutional problems?
For the holidays: Give your friends and
loved ones Carbon Offsets—the gift
that keeps on giving (~100 years)