Criticism
Emissions trading has been criticised for a variety of reasons.
In the popular science magazine New Scientist, Lohmann (2006) argued that trading pollution allowances should be avoided as a climate change policy. Lohman gave several reasons for this view. First, global warming will require more radical change than the modest changes driven by previous pollution trading schemes such as the US SO2 market. Global warming requires "nothing less than a reorganisation of society and technology that will leave most remaining fossil fuels safely underground." Carbon trading schemes have tended to reward the heaviest polluters with 'windfall profits' when they are granted enough carbon credits to match historic production. Carbon trading encourages business-as-usual as expensive long-term structural changes will not be made if there is a cheaper source of carbon credits. Cheap "offset" carbon credits are frequently available from the less developed countries, where they may be generated by local polluters at the expense of local communities.
Lohmann (2006b) supported conventional regulation, green taxes, and energy policies that are "justice-based" and "community-driven." According to Carbon Trade Watch (2009), carbon trading has had a "disastrous track record." The effectiveness of the EU ETS was criticized, and it was argued that the CDM had routinely favoured "environmentally ineffective and socially unjust projects."
Annie Leonard provided a critical view on carbon emissions trading in her 2009 documentary The Story of Cap and Trade. This documentary emphasized three factors: unjust financial advantages to major pollutors resulting from free permits, an ineffectiveness of the system caused by cheating in connection with carbon offsets and a distraction from the search for other solutions.
Read more about this topic: Emissions Trading
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (18991961)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ... and so on. He said the dedication should really read: To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harpers instead of The Hardware Age.”
—Brenda Ueland (18911985)