Join Debatepedia's Facebook group! | News: Next on Debate Digest: War on Drugs
See Debatepedia's resources for the Spring 2010 The People Speak Global Debates on climate change adaptation
Argument: A cap-and-trade creates arbitrary base-lines
From Debatepedia
Parent article
Supporting Quotations
Bailey, "Carbon Taxes versus Carbon Markets", 5/18/07 - "Carbon taxes also avoid the baseline quandary that bedevils carbon markets. For example, signatories to the Kyoto Protocol are supposed to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by 7 percent below what they emitted in 1990. Why? That goal has no relationship to any specific environmental policy objective. In fact, achieving the cuts specified by the Kyoto Protocol goals would reduce projected average global temperatures by only about 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050. And, as the stalled international negotiations about what to do after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 show, it is very difficult to set new baselines. Also, where should baselines be established for rapidly growing economies like China and India, whose energy use and emissions are expected to more than double by 2030? Under the Kyoto Protocol, the natural baseline is what emissions would be without any restraints. However, calculating or predicting what a country’s emissions will be 20 to 30 years in the future is impossible to do with accuracy."
- Contention that a carbon tax avoids this problem: William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who a leading advocate of a carbon tax argued 3/27/06, "the natural baseline is a zero-carbon-tax level of emissions, which is a straightforward calculation for old and new countries. Countries’ efforts are then judged relative to that baseline."
