Cap-and-Trade-with-Offsets, while profitable for offset investors, fossil fuel interests and Wall Street, will not be effective in addressing climate change. The main reason is that carbon offsets are an unverifiable, unenforceable, fatally flawed mechanism that can’t be fixed. In addition, cap-and-trade, even without offsets, would not make clean energy profitable within a known time frame. This would delay clean energy investments. Cap-and-Trade-with-Offsets is the mechanism that has been proposed in the major climate legislation introduced in Congress to date. In order to get support from powerful special interests, the climate legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 and introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2010 would have allowed all required greenhouse gas reductions for almost 20 years to be met with carbon offsets. Cap-and-Trade-with-Offsets is also the mechanism that has been used to address climate change in Europe, where it has resulted in windfall profits for utilities and few greenhouse-gas reductions. More info here. |
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