EPA Lawyers Challenge Cap and Trade for Climate

 

A cap and trade system would force overall emission reductions but allow flexibility through a market that trades credits accrued by companies or institutions that make extra-deep cuts. - Courtesy of Global Warming 1

When an economist at the Environmental Protection Agency rejected the Obama administration's stance on global warming by writing an unsolicited report challenging the scientific consensus on greenhouse dangers, groups fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases hailed him as a courageous maverick. Climate campaigners said he was irrelevant and ill informed.

Now two more functionaries at the agency -- Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are lawyers and a married couple -- have sharply criticized the core element of climate legislation pushed by Democratic lawmakers and President Obama.

Their views are unlikely to be welcomed by either side in the political fight. Like the administration, they say that human-driven climate change poses enormous risks; they just completely reject the cap and trade system favored by Democratic leaders and some environmental groups.

Zabel and Williams argued that the trading system provides far too much leeway for dealing in offsets, credits earned by avoiding or preventing emissions of carbon dioxide. In summary, they wrote: ''Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more.''

Any climate legislation could affect the equipment used for your landscape business from blowers to utility vehicles to skid loaders. Going green will continue to be economically attractive.

- Courtesy of New York Times