Monday, November 23, 2009

Anti-CPRS from the left side

This ETS-lite deserves to be rejected

Kenneth Davidson has been reading the Friends of the Earth anti ETS report I mentioned here recently.

This part I hadn't heard before:

Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducing what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.

It should be self-evident: a ton of carbon in wood is not going to be ''sequestered'' from the atmosphere as safely, or as long, as a ton of carbon in an unmined underground coal deposit.

But Australia tried to introduce a refinement to make rorting of the scheme even easier. According to Spash, during negotiations in Bonn before the 2009 Copenhagen summit on new Kyoto targets, Australia argued for excluding natural disasters, which basically means if, say, forests planted as offsets burnt down they would be treated as still existing.

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