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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25742)	11/12/2009 11:37:46 AM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Having been involved in such rationing as cap and trade, when there was a fuel shortage in NZ and the available fuel was rationed on the basis of previous consumption, there were ridiculous inequities. For example a factory might have shut, but they got their allocation of oil. Others might have just started up and the previous year had used less than when in full operation, so they were out of luck and oil. The only way to rationally ration things is by price. There should have been no existing use right to carry on polluting simply because they had already been doing it. That makes it impossible for new competitors to start production. If an existing business can't carry the cost of their harm to the community, then they should shut down. Cap and trade was a way of pretending there isn't a cost and keeping the status quo. If the status quo is ending the world, the cost of that ending should be put on the cause of it = the existing polluters and any new ones. As with the fuel oil allocation in 1979 in NZ, there are all sorts of rorts and wrigglings to get an allocation of CO2 rights and they have been well used. Meanwhile, China opens a new coal-fired power plant weekly [so they say]. New Zealand being puritan about CO2 and cap and trade and selling China our coal is pointless [in cutting CO2 pollution] and harmful economically for NZ. Mqurice