BeGreen said:
Maria Cantwell(D-Wa) and Susan Collins(R-Me) have introduced a clean energy bill that finally cuts through the lobbyist and partisan pork grabbing. Instead of cap and trade benefiting industry it is a cap and dividend benefiting us all. And in typical Cantwell style, it does this in a bill of 39 pages instead of thousands of pages of corporate loopholes. Give it a read and if you support this action, take time to let your reps know.
(broken link removed to http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/cap-dividend-clearly-a-better-idea)
I agree this is much better than cap and trade, but it will not benefit us, other than as a feel-good measure. Any attempt to significantly lower emissions unilaterally, without China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc. helping out, is doomed to fail as a means of reducing CO2 levels by any significant degree. It is just a recipe for our continuing economic decline without any real benefit of lower
global emissions. Domestic reductions are irrelevant if they do not alter global levels.
Is the US actually going to consume less, or just produce less here at home? Unless we really reduce consumption we will just continue offshoring production at our own economic peril, and perhaps to no net environmental benefit. (I do suppose making people poorer will eventually reduce consumption.)
Note the lengthy reader comment at the link you posted, which states in part:
"If we use either cap-and-trade or this fee-dividend, it not only destroys America's economy further, but both approaches will make things worse, not better. The reason is that it will send production to places like China, Brazil and India who have much higher CO2 emissions per KW (little to no pollution controls)."
I'm not saying we should pollute more, or pay workers less, or bring back sweatshops. But do we really want to give even more business to countries that already
do those things? China is going to continue polluting rivers and exploiting workers, and if we want to export our CO2 emissions to them, they'll be happy to take that over for us as well. But they'll be sending all that CO2 right back over to us, for a fee.
