Cap and Trade
Jul. 2nd, 2009 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hkellickSo props need to go out to Speaker Pelosi for pushing the Carbon Cap and Trade bill through the House this last Friday. Apparently getting the congressmen to sign off on it was very like herding cats. Some wouldn't sign it because it was too stringent and would hurt their constituents. Others wouldn't sign it because it wasn't stringent enough. Regardless, Pelosi handed Obama a victory.
I find all the screaming about how TERRIBLE Cap and Trade is to be.. well, somewhat laughable honestly.
The idiots that scream about how terrible it is, how it'll ruin businesses really need to read up on their history, because we've already instituted cap and trade in the past and it's worked.
Once, not so very long ago, the great lakes were a mess. Especially Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five. So bad was Lake Erie that it got special mention in Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" (now long gone, but it was there.) Lake Erie was so bad that little no oxygen was found inside the lake itself.
Scientists went to go determine the cause and they found that the answer, much like Global Warming, was due to Human Pollution. Specifically, it was due to the dumping of phosphorus and nitrogen into the great lakes.
In short, the reasons for this were... nitrogen and phosphorus are chemicals that living systems need to grow. Algal blooms, upon access to the added nitrogen and phosphorus, would grow.. and grow and grow and grow. Then they'd die and they'd sink to the bottom. And on the bottom of the sea they'd be eaten by bacteria that used oxygen in the lake to digest the algae. Which would remove the oxygen from the lake, leading to an anoxic environment.
Remove the added nutrients and you control the algal blooms.
The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 which demanded that we clean up these bodies of water. Places like Lake Erie and the Potomac River and so on on and so forth. And, like now, the EPA was trying to determine the fairest/most acceptable way to dole out the oncoming changes.
Enter the term TMDL, Total Maximum Daily Load.. the concept that a body of water can handle a certain amount of a pollutant and stay within the healthy range. For example, and I'm making number up here.. let's say Lake Erie can accept 25 megatons of phosphorus a day and not develop so many algal blooms that the lake becomes anoxic. Let's now assume that 5 of those megatons is added to the lake via nonpoint sources, mostly agriculture. That means that we can allow 20 megatons of phosphorus a day to be added into the lake from controllable point sources: factories, wastewater treatment plants, etc.
Enter cap and trade. Don't know if it was called that, but it's the same policy. We have 20,000 permits that allow you to put in 1,000 tons of phosphorus into the lake a day. You can buy and sell them to each other as you like, but no more than 25 megatons of phosphorus can enter the lake in one day.
And the system worked. There was whining. There was complaining, but the system WORKED, still works now. And the Lakes are so much better for it.
What we institute here in America won't necessarily have the same huge changes as what happened in the 70s along the Great Lakes since we're one of many polluters and the globe is a much bigger system than five interconncted lakes, but the point is.. the policy is sound and has worked in the past.
I find all the screaming about how TERRIBLE Cap and Trade is to be.. well, somewhat laughable honestly.
The idiots that scream about how terrible it is, how it'll ruin businesses really need to read up on their history, because we've already instituted cap and trade in the past and it's worked.
Once, not so very long ago, the great lakes were a mess. Especially Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five. So bad was Lake Erie that it got special mention in Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" (now long gone, but it was there.) Lake Erie was so bad that little no oxygen was found inside the lake itself.
Scientists went to go determine the cause and they found that the answer, much like Global Warming, was due to Human Pollution. Specifically, it was due to the dumping of phosphorus and nitrogen into the great lakes.
In short, the reasons for this were... nitrogen and phosphorus are chemicals that living systems need to grow. Algal blooms, upon access to the added nitrogen and phosphorus, would grow.. and grow and grow and grow. Then they'd die and they'd sink to the bottom. And on the bottom of the sea they'd be eaten by bacteria that used oxygen in the lake to digest the algae. Which would remove the oxygen from the lake, leading to an anoxic environment.
Remove the added nutrients and you control the algal blooms.
The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 which demanded that we clean up these bodies of water. Places like Lake Erie and the Potomac River and so on on and so forth. And, like now, the EPA was trying to determine the fairest/most acceptable way to dole out the oncoming changes.
Enter the term TMDL, Total Maximum Daily Load.. the concept that a body of water can handle a certain amount of a pollutant and stay within the healthy range. For example, and I'm making number up here.. let's say Lake Erie can accept 25 megatons of phosphorus a day and not develop so many algal blooms that the lake becomes anoxic. Let's now assume that 5 of those megatons is added to the lake via nonpoint sources, mostly agriculture. That means that we can allow 20 megatons of phosphorus a day to be added into the lake from controllable point sources: factories, wastewater treatment plants, etc.
Enter cap and trade. Don't know if it was called that, but it's the same policy. We have 20,000 permits that allow you to put in 1,000 tons of phosphorus into the lake a day. You can buy and sell them to each other as you like, but no more than 25 megatons of phosphorus can enter the lake in one day.
And the system worked. There was whining. There was complaining, but the system WORKED, still works now. And the Lakes are so much better for it.
What we institute here in America won't necessarily have the same huge changes as what happened in the 70s along the Great Lakes since we're one of many polluters and the globe is a much bigger system than five interconncted lakes, but the point is.. the policy is sound and has worked in the past.
