Carbon Blues by Mike Mason

Author:Mike Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

So, basically, major producers and distributors of fossil fuels have their own cap set by the government. This cap is regulated by permits specifying the amount of carbon they are permitted to emit. If the permit-holders under produce carbon then they can trade their unfilled quotas to others. So the buying and selling of permits will take place. On 1 January 2018 Ontario joined Quebec and California to institute a cap-and-trade program.

In August 2018, the newly elected Conservative government of Ontario in a grandstanding gesture aimed at its rural constituents passed the Cap and Trade Cancellation Act. “Cancelling cap-andtrade means cancelling all current program funding designed to cut Ontario’s carbon pollution.”50 Public protest against this measure was muted. A few months later the Canadian federal government reminded Ontarians that any province establishing the cap-and-trade system would have to set emissions caps that correspond to how much a specific carbon price is expected to reduce emissions.

Although the cancellation of Ontario’s cap-and-trade has been lamented by some environmental organizations, other commentators, writing from a green perspective, have been openly critical of it. Troy Vettese:

[N]ot only does cap-and-trade rarely work, sometimes it is not even intended to. The world’s biggest cap-and-trade programme for CO2 emissions, the European Emissions Trading System (ETS), has largely functioned to forestall meaningful action against climate change since its creation in 2005. At its nadir, in 2013, a tonne of carbon fetched less than €3, and even at the moment of writing (early May 2018) the price is only €10 per tonne. This is a far cry from an effective price for carbon – ExxonMobil estimates that the price would need to be $2,000 per tonne for global warming to be limited to 1.6 degrees centigrade … The problem originated from the European Union’s decision to placate industry by setting the number of permits too high, so ensuring prices would remain low.51

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