The dollars and nonsense of carbon trading

A company in Regina has started paying farmers and ranchers $1.00 per acre to do nothing.  If you own 5000 acres of ranch land in Saskatchewan, land that neither grows stuff or is used for more than just the occasional cattle grazing, then you can get paid $5000 by a company called C-Green Aggregators.  C-Green sees green in the fact that your previously-ignored land does not generate carbon or green house gases (GHG) and what used to be called the Back-Forty is now called a Carbon Credit.  Why do they pay you for Carbon Credits?

Those $5000 in credits will in turn be sold to companies, such as the Oil Sands folks who produce millions of tonnes of GHG and carbon each day.  Rather than cleaning up their act, the producers will be offered to purchase the credits accumulated by C-Green to offset the amount they pollute - on paper.

So look at it this way; through this simplified example, On Day Zero, your 5000 acres of land produced no units of carbon but Oil Sands produce 10000 units of carbon.  On Day One C-Green pays you $5000 for the 5000 credits associated with your land.  On Day Two they sell those 5000 credits to Oil Sands who in turn apply those credits thereby reducing the amount of their carbon outputs on paper.

So the net total reduction ON PAPER is 5000 units of carbon but the net total reduction of carbon in real life is ZERO.  How does that clean up the environment?

You can see why the farmers and ranchers buy into this money-shifting scheme but what is in it for C-Green?  The make the GREEN, the moolah, the dinaro.  The credits for which they paid the farmer $5000 will be sold to Oil Sands for $50,000.  These credits are currently sold on the Chicago Exchange  and will eventually be traded on the Montreal stock market.

It is expected that the largest purchasers of these credits will not be the polluters however.  According to the C-Green web site, purchasers will include hedge funds, investment companies and speculators.  Carbon and green house gases to those folks are the same as toothpaste - a commodity to make money off.

This scheme is called CAP and Trade.  It is what the Conservatives and the NDP want to install.  Carbon is currently priced at $4 per tonne.  The NDP web site expects it to be worth $35 per tonne.  Now that is growth.  C-Green is currently fighting with the government over whether the credits will be exposed to GST.  So if the Cons and NDP get their Cap and Trade scheme, there will be very little effect on GHG or carbon but the GST coffers will swell as well as the coffers of their buddies on Bay Street.

Isn't democracy wonderful?

Green Shift plan?

Dion released his Green Shift plan yesterday. I downloaded a copy of the guide so that I could comment with some facts behind me, rather than just empty rhetoric as which comes out the mouths of the opponents to fixing the climate.

"Mr. Dion's policies are crazy. This is crazy economics. It's crazy environmental policy," blurts PM Harper to anyone who will listen (and the numbers who listen are growing smaller by the day).

Even the ultra left Deputy NDP leader Thomas Mulcair branded the plan "a train wreck of programs..."

Is the plan complete? No. I would prefer that the plan give some more obvious estimates of the effects of the plan on carbon emissions. The Liberals have stated that their goal was to reduce 2020 emissions to a level that will be 20% below the level in 1990. Is that do-able? Certainly the Con and NDP policies of capping emissions won't do it.

Is the plan possible to achieve, especially the revenue neutral part? Both the Cons and the NDP, as well as most of the media gloss over the statement in the plan that the Auditor General will make sure that money in versus money out as outlined in the plan is achieved. Do the Cons, NDP and media not trust the Auditor General?

To underline and personalize the way the plan will work, the Green Shift web site (www.thegreenshift.ca) has a calculator to determine what your tax offset will be under the plan. However, rather than being personal on the cost side, the plan makes a general statement that the cost will be $350 per household, offset by the savings in taxes. We have two vehicles, live in the country and have gas heat. Are we typical? I am not sure.

Have we gone so far to partisanship in this country that we automatically oppose any idea if it isn't our own? Pretty sad state of affairs.