Conservative Principles Now

The New York Times reports today:

In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.

“The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card,” Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel, one of the world’s largest green travel companies to embrace environmental sustainability, said in an interview. “It’s seductive to the consumer who says, ‘It’s $4 and I’m carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.’ ”

Unfortunately Washington DC is lagging far behind the private sector when it comes to acknowledging just how fraudulent carbon offsets are. The Waxman-Markey cap and tradeenergy tax bill allows for companies to exceed their carbon cap requirements by purchasing two billion tons of carbon offsets; one billion tons for international allocation and one billion tons in the U.S. itself.

The NYT does a decent job of detailing why carbon offset programs are completely fraudulent, but the utter uselessness of Waxman-Markey does not end there. Not only does the bill create a huge offset loophole, but it also gives away more than 100% of the carbon allowances necessary for the U.S. to meet the bill’s stated carbon reduction targets.

Even with all of these allowance over issuances and offset loopholes, Waxman-Markey still would do noting to change world temperatures. Climatologist Chip Knappenberger crunched the numbers and found that even the strictest version of Waxman-Markey would reduce projected global temperatures by just 0.044ºC by 2050. That is less than one-tenth of one degree.

And then there are the costs of Waxman-Markey: $3,000 per year for an average family-of-four almost , 2.5 million net job losses by 2035, and a cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) loss of $9.4 trillion between 2012 and 2035.

“There’s a point at which you’ve got to ask yourself, what are we doing here? What’s the point?”

That’s Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton administration official and advisor to then-Vice President Gore, and she’s talking about the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. In order to garner enough votes to pass the House of Representatives, policymakers made promises that have groups like Greenpeace questioning the environmental effectiveness of the bill.

One of the most contentious provisions in the bill is the use of carbon offsets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Offsets allow carbon-emitting businesses to pay others to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Bob Barr, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explains: “A manufacturing plant in, say, Gary, Ind., that is exceeding its ‘permitted’ expulsion of CO2, could continue to commit this sin against humanity by paying for a Brazilian farmer to plant some trees in the rain forest. A more patriotic company might achieve the same result by paying an Iowa farmer to implement more ‘Earth-friendly’ farming practices. Of course, to guard against some nefarious polluter trying to cheat Uncle Sam and the world by claiming bogus ‘offsets,’ here must be a monitoring mechanism. Enter the ‘Offsets Integrity Advisory Board’—yet another group of scientific ‘experts’ that would be tasked with compiling a list of qualifying offsets around the globe.”

Section 731a of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill creates this independent “Offsets Integrity Advisory Board” to help the administrator make decisions about the appropriate regulations. The board authorizes sector-specific allocations of international offset credits—which are highly vulnerable to politicization.

Proponents of cap and trade are trying to convince farmers that they will be the big beneficiaries of a carbon offset program because farmers can use cleaner technology, reduce nitrous oxide emissions, or simply not grow crops. But because so many sectors can take advantage of the carbon offset program, there will be little left for farmers. Page 60 of the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill is projecting that most of the domestic offsets will come from forestry and growing trees.

The reality is farmers use a lot of electricity, a lot of diesel fuel, and a lot of natural gas-derived chemicals and fertilizers to grow crops and maintain their farms. So it shouldn’t be surprising that a cap and trade program that artificially drives up the cost of energy will unfavorably affect farmers.

If it sounds silly and fraught with fraud, it is. Even with an “Offsets Integrity Advisory Board,” offsets are difficult to monitor and regulate. They are also very easy to manipulate. For example, a country could build a coal plant and say they’ve created offsets because they were going to build a dirtier one.

Bryan Leyland, chairman of the economic panel of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, said, “I first heard about carbon trading at a conference more than 10 years ago. I got up and said ‘If I was the financial adviser to the Mafia, I would advise them to get into carbon trading.’ Nothing that has happened since then changes my opinion - rather the reverse.”

In fact, the Italian mafia is getting involved in green energy.

And let’s not forget Enron’s Ken Lay was a strong supporter of carbon cap and trade. He believed a cap and trade program would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative.” These carbon allowances that will be bought and sold have a value estimated at $50 billion to $300 billion annually, and the trade in them would be a huge new business. Enron may be gone, but others ready to take advantage of cap and trade—at the public’s expense—are not.