Cap and trade 101

October 6, 2009  |  Length: 00:05:36

You may have heard of the carbon-trading system being proposed in Washington, but how does it work? At the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito, Calif., executives discuss the various characteristics that make up the system such as trading and offsets. The panel, moderated by Edge Innovation Partners' David Edwards, includes Randy Wilson, principal at KPMG; and David O’Conner, senior vice president at ML Strategies.

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Waxman-Markey is a complete fraud
Although in pure academic economic terms, ?Cap and Trade? is a
perfectly legitimate and logical tool, how we are about to apply it
to CO2 is a complete fraud. Waxman-Markey is thousands of pages of
exemptions and loopholes for special interests. In the end, this is
a bill that will punish politically out-of-favor regions and
industries, reward favored ones, and will serve as a cynical stealth
tax upon all those fools who honestly believed that they were going
to be part of the 98% that would not be getting their taxes raised
for our massive government expansion.

As for regulating CO2, please consider this: There is no aspect of
your life, from the moment you are conceived until long after you?re
dead and buried that does not involve converting matter into CO2.
Once government bureaucracies get the power to regulate the emission
of CO2, there will be absolutely no activity that you partake in life
that will not be subject to regulation by people you?ve never seen,
heard of, or voted for. This will ultimately mean complete control
over your life. Sure, today they talk about regulating politically-
incorrect activities such as running coal-fired power plants, driving
SUVs and jetting off to the Bahamas. But once those carbon-spewing
evils are vanquished, what will be next? Carbon taxes will be used
to extract wealth from those who were told they wouldn?t be paying
more taxes. Next will be burgers at McDonalds, and then centralized
control of your home thermostat. Sooner or later, they will work
their way down to either some activity that you enjoy in your life,
or worse, some activity that represents your livelihood. Nothing you
do in your live will be safe from government control. The very
concept of freedom in your life, both personal and economic, will be
vanquished.
Posted by JohnMcGrew@...
8th Oct 2009
0 Votes
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RE: Cap and trade 101
Cap and trade is just a fraud to justify increased taxes. Doubling the cost of energy will wreck the economy. fundamentally it was the doubling of the cost of oil that triggered our current market collapse as well as the 1976 crash. The rapid recovery is due to the rapid fall in oil prices.
Posted by gguessa
15th Oct 2009
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RE: Cap and trade 101
According to Obama, his cap and trade plan will "necessarily cause electricity rates to skyrocket". This means that everything that you buy that uses electricity in its manufacture or provisioning will have higher energy costs. By the time that an ear of corn gets planted, harvested, processed, and put on a grocery store shelf in a can it will have been taxed at least 10 times and will continue to be taxed as long as it stays on the self. By the time a doctor determines the need for a surgery and performs the surgery, his services will also have been taxed at least 10 times. All of these costs will be passed on to consumers and Obama's necessarily skyrocketing electricity rates will result in skyrocketing costs of everything that you buy.

Manufacturers of products and providers of services will not be discouraged from reducing emissions as they buy carbon credits, mark them up, and resell them to the public. Carbon credits are another source of income without production, IP development, or creative costs. Consumers will pay and everyone else will divide up the spoils as the money works its way up the carbon credit food chain. Emissions have continues to rise in England and Canada, where cap and trade programs already exist, as the standard of living drops. This is a diabolical RICO protection racket that only serves to strip the public of its wealth and lower the country's standard of living. It is genocidal in that the poor and elderly will begin to die when they no longer can keep their utilities turned on in the winter and summer, buy enough food, pay for their medicine, or afford transportation to work if they have a job. It is racist in that the demographics of the effected are disproportionally made up of minorities. This is the substance of conspiracy theories in that it is hard to imagine that anyone would be so incompetent as to bring this disaster on the population unintentionally.
Posted by websmith
20th Oct 2009
0 Votes
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RE: Cap and trade 101
The Zoo is alive and well.

Information technology was going to enable us to work less and enjoy life more.
Why then are we working longer hours with greater stress?

New monetary systems were going to allow us unheard of prosperity.
Yep, circulate something of no real value, take a percentage, churn it, take a percentage, churn it, take a percentage, ad infinitum.
The faster we churn, the wealthier we all get.
It hasn't worked too well has it?

Could someone please prove to me that this carbon trading waffle is something more than just another money making scheme for the erstwhile skimmers.

Looks like another churn deal coming on.
When the music stops on this one, we had better have our bailout strategies in place.

Hmm, daylight saving offset credits trading, maybe water offset credits trading.

I have it, you don't.
I sell it to you, but keep it.
You bundle it up and sell it, and as long as I don't buy it just before the music stops, I get to keep it.
But by then I have probably sold it again.
No worries.

Posted by Big River
20th Oct 2009
0 Votes
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RE: Cap and trade 101
How many jobs will ultimatly be lost as more and more businesses go under due to the heavy tax on carbon emissions? Who is going to make the rest of the world acountable for thier carbon emissions?
Why isn't this starting on a small scale, Why does it have to be "all or nothing"!
Posted by denturehead2@...
20th Oct 2009
0 Votes
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RE: Cap and trade 101
They say that where there is a 'scheme' there is always a 'schemer'. Cap in Trade is definitely a scheme, some say a 'scam'!. Please allow me to digress....Our Sun was manufactured by a celestial architect by the name of Vishwakarma, I am not kidding check it out. About five billion years ago, after our Sun had exploded as a supernova, Vishwakarma was contracted to reignite the remnant Neutron Star (a Pulsar) with cosmic debris. The purpose of this enterprise was to transmute common elements of the periodic table, into more valuable exotic elements. The panic about the two thirds missing neutrinos, which might indicate a Sun exhausting it's Hydrogen fuel, is erroneous, only one third of our exotic manufactured Sun is energised by Hydrogen fusion. the other two thirds of the energy is produced from violent nuclear events as matter gravitates into this ultra-dense Neutron core. So great is the energy of these reactions, it keeps our Sun inflated. This explains the anomaly of our Sun's 'decreasing' rate of rotation with 'increasing' lattitude. The actual rotation is about the center of gravity, and Jupiter offsets the balance. Jupiter's period of orbit 11 years coincides almost exactly with the sun-spot cycle. It is our Sun that drives the weather, not CO2. The superintendent of our Sun, is Vivishvan. Elements of the Chemical Periodic Order are expelled from His nuclear transmutation facility in strict order of Atomic Weight. Visisvan is the propriotor, the material is His property. We are his workforce, and many of them are serving a custodial sentence (penal servitude) We are now entering the second phase of this project. Car and trade has a primary purpose of funding Global Governance. All will be revealed in due time. There are bigger schemers in Heaven than here on Earth. The Corporation Trademark is the Sun's dear sister, our Moon. 223 Lunations = 242 Draconic revolutions = 239 Anomalistic revolutions, (all perfect whole numbers!) and a perfect density and perfect size, allowing for a perfect Saros of Eclipses. 18 Years, 11 Days 8 Hours. Think that's a mere accident? a fantastic 'goldilocks' massive coincidence? Think again! Those craters were 'directed' impacts to nudge our Moon exactly to the right spot. Do you think Saturn's rings have no purpose?...Think again.

Check Out PhysicsForums:-

The Mayan Underworld - Page 3
Krishna requested Vishwa Karma - the celestial architect to build a city for his clan. Vishwa Karma after surveying the area felt that more ...

www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=250216&page=3 -
Posted by Brother Martin de Porres
20th Nov 2009
0 Votes
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RE: Cap and trade 101
The Indian Epic Poem "Mahabharata" was intended for schoolchildren to read and memorize. Kids were a lot brighter in those days. The fables presented were an introduction to the reality. Now let's examine the 'fable' then the 'reality' :-

September is time to worship Lord Vishwakarma - the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects. Son of Brahma, he is the divine draftsman of the whole universe, and the official builder of all the gods' palaces. Vishwakarma is also the designer of all the god's vehicles and their weapons.



Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 237901
(issue of 10 June 2002)

"If the Universe Were a Computer"

Information theory says that every physical system, from a glass of water to a microchip, holds 1s and 0s in the states of its component particles. Changes in those states could be called "computation," just as your desktop machine computes by changing the information in its memory. In the 10 June print issue of PRL, one researcher pushes this idea to the limit, calculating the total number of bits in the Universe and how many computations they could have performed since the big bang. In one interpretation, these numbers outline a grand computation the Universe itself is performing.

Two years ago, Seth Lloyd of MIT studied the properties of the "ultimate laptop," a hypothetical device whose speed and memory would be limited solely by physical laws [1]. He had to consider two things for this calculation: energy and entropy. It takes energy to turn a 0 into a 1 by inverting a nuclear spin or switching on a transistor; and entropy has a well-known relation to the number of states in a system, each of which embodies a bit.

Now Lloyd has applied the same approach to the Universe as a whole. "The ideas are cosmic but the physics is mundane," he says, involving mostly well-established laws. The Universe's energy is locked up primarily in matter according to E = mc2, and is basically constant. Taking rough estimates of the age and energy density of the Universe, and assuming that gravity's total energy is equal in magnitude to that of matter, he finds that the Universe could have performed 10120 basic operations, or ops, on all its bits so far....etc."
Posted by Brother Martin de Porres
20th Nov 2009
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Transcript

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>> Cap and trade what it is and just so we can make sure everybody in the room is starting with the same you know base level of knowledge.

>> Yeah I think it's good to set the baseline but then a few of these where we've assumed more knowledge than probably was given but I think this is a very knowledgeable audience so we'll give it about a minute. The name is very descriptive in cap and trade so that's a good thing. There's basically 4 components of cap and trade and if you look at whether it's the Chicago Climate Exchange or the EUETS or the bill that's currently before the senate. There's really 4 things you have to accomplish. One you have to be able to set a cap which is a limit, the total amount of carbon or green house gases that an economy emits at a given time and the US has done that on a baseline if you read the house bill. In 2005 that's 7.5 billion metric tons of carbon is emitted by the US economy by what they cover they call covered entities these are sort of the industries they want to cover under the bill. The second thing you have to do is once you set the cap is basically distribute the right to emit green house gases and that's done either through allowances or through an auction process or a combination of both. The 3rd thing once you've don't that is you have to step down the cap each year and if you look at the bill what's proposed is by 2012 we would be at 97% of the 2005 levels and by 2020 we would be about 80% of 2005. So that's the ability every year to make carbon more expensive by making less of it available to be emitted. And then the 4th thing you need is an ability to verify, to make sure that people are complying with requirements to step down the cap and that's a very important part of the process I think we'll talk about later on but I think those in general are your 4 components of a carbon market.

>> Great. And David if I could pain you to talk give us a little bit of an understanding of offsets, sort of what they are, what kinds of offsets are in the market today. Just so we understand that category since that is the one key part that can overlap here with the clean tech industry.

>> Sure. Allowances are a government permit to emit a certain amount of carbon. Offsets essentially are the investment in activities or technologies, behavioral changes which will result in the reduction of let's say in this case a ton of carbon. So an allowance and an offset are both tradable and both have the same if you will currency or face value that is to say they are the equivalent of a ton of carbon one an allowance to emit the other demonstrated effectiveness in reducing by a ton carbon emissions. So the difference though between them from that point is dramatic because with offsets you have to make an investment in some kind of project or activity that will achieve certain standards and legislation that creates a cap and trade system will include standards for acceptable offsets and let's say in the case of the current Waxman Markey assumed spelling Bill the EPA administrator is given responsibility to certify which categories or projects are eligible as well as the criteria that will be used to measure their productivity because it isn't easy to determine whether you in fact actually reduced a ton of carbon emitted because in any instance where you're claiming that you have to demonstrate that you have done that over and above let's call it a baseline assumption about what would have been saved anyhow. So the whole process of getting carbon offsets certified and verified as Randy suggested is quite complicated and the government regulations for what's eligible and what it takes to prove that you accomplished. Let's say in the case of sequestration permanent sequestration and so forth there is a lot of complicated rule making yet to be done. It won't all be done in the federal bill. A lot of the actual details will be left to executive agencies but there's no question that offsets are gonna be an important part of the legislation and I think it's fair to say that congress assumes that offsets are going to help deal with the problem of potential severe increases in the price of carbon allowances. Offsets are a kind of safety valve so that the price of allowances gets higher and higher as the cap gets lower there'll be more and more incentive to invest in offsets and the bill actually allows for the geographic eligibility of offsets to expand in the event that those prices get high or there aren't enough offsets produced in the United States so that international projects can qualify their offsets. The current Waxman Markey Bill allows a total of 2 billion tons of offsets, a portion half and half between domestic and international but if the US market is not producing offsets then more international offsets become eligible so safety valve to try and mitigate sort of the increase in the prices for allowances.

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