To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.
I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.
Sure there are differences for carbon tax the price is set and for a carbon market like EU ETS the emissions are fixed. However I fail to see how $24.15/t in Australia in 2014 is a better policy then EU ETS at €74.9/t right now, which is $122.78/t. That is all in Australian dollar. EU ETS also had a lot of problems, but by now most of them are fixed. With the additional ETS-2, which uses the same systems, but covers road transport and heating it should cover most EU emissions soonish too. Australias system is in scope fairly compareable to EU ETS-1.
Please explain to me, why EU ETS is a pittance, when it is clearly more money, then Australias carbon tax, which you praise. If I wanted to be fair and compare both systems the carbon markets looks much better, as it is still in place and the cost per t are higher.
Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.
More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.
Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.
Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.
And this goes back to the first post I made, about the difference between carbon markets and carbon offsets. The EU ETS does not have offsets and does not allow for emitters promising to emit less to be paid for doing so. There are a capped amount of carbon credits auctioned by a government body, which companies emitting within the EU and some other member countries have to buy to be permitted to emit. The amount of credits is lowered every year towards zero by 2050. The money paid goes to the government to be used to support green projects or be paid out to citizens. To put it another way:
No private company benefits from selling any sort of carbon credits in that system
Companies who purchase credits have to do so, due to emitting, so no pretending to not doing that
It is raising in the long term depending on how much emissions decline, due to the cap being lowered
a clear path towards zero emissions within the system(unlike a tax for example)
To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.
I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.
Sure there are differences for carbon tax the price is set and for a carbon market like EU ETS the emissions are fixed. However I fail to see how $24.15/t in Australia in 2014 is a better policy then EU ETS at €74.9/t right now, which is $122.78/t. That is all in Australian dollar. EU ETS also had a lot of problems, but by now most of them are fixed. With the additional ETS-2, which uses the same systems, but covers road transport and heating it should cover most EU emissions soonish too. Australias system is in scope fairly compareable to EU ETS-1.
Please explain to me, why EU ETS is a pittance, when it is clearly more money, then Australias carbon tax, which you praise. If I wanted to be fair and compare both systems the carbon markets looks much better, as it is still in place and the cost per t are higher.
Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.
More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.
Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.
Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.
And this goes back to the first post I made, about the difference between carbon markets and carbon offsets. The EU ETS does not have offsets and does not allow for emitters promising to emit less to be paid for doing so. There are a capped amount of carbon credits auctioned by a government body, which companies emitting within the EU and some other member countries have to buy to be permitted to emit. The amount of credits is lowered every year towards zero by 2050. The money paid goes to the government to be used to support green projects or be paid out to citizens. To put it another way: