Do we really want
a scheme like this?
Members of the U.S. Congress currently considering cap-and-trade legislation should take look at our neighbors across the Atlantic to see how well a similar scheme is working.
Europe’s top polluters are cashing in on the Emission’s Trading Scheme the European Union has instituted, with 10 firms together collecting permits valued at more than 500 million euros, Agence France Presse reports.
Steel and cement makers, Europe’s top polluters, are polluting less because of the current economic downtown and have been able to sell or write down their excess carbon credits as profit.
“Little or no actual ‘effort’ toward emissions reductions need have taken place, yet these companies’ books are rising or falling with the carbon credit market.” concludes a recently released report.
The U.S. should take a careful look at what is happening with attempts at carbon emissions reduction in Europe before considering a cap-and-trade system in our own country.
If European companies have done nothing to reduce emissions and simply profited from imaginary carbon credits, why should Americans be burdened with additional costs a cap-and-trade system would put on goods and energy?
The only benefactors from such a system would be the brokerages that sell the carbon credits and the new bureaucratic jobs that will come from regulating the market.
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