Comments rbayon has made

Let's talk real cases

I am intrigued by this discussion. What worries me is that too much abstraction, too much theory may lead us into a series of bad decisions based on seemingly unassailable logic. Or to put it more colloquially: the perfect can often be the enemy of the good. I believe markets can provide a useful tool in our approach to global climate change; a tool that is in many ways much more powerful than taxes or some of the other arrows in our quiver. But if we are looking for perfection, we will be looking for it as the world literally burns. The real benefit of carbon trading is that it begins to put a price on the emission of greenhouse gases. And once these things have a price, our economic system treats them differently. Managers get rewarded for reducing emissions. Sure, we can use taxes to set a price on carbon as well, but this is a much less elegant and a much more inflexible mechanism. Just think about the politics of changing a tax regime and then tell me how easy it is to change.

So 'nuf said. Let me throw a concrete case, a story I wrote about a woman I met in Uganda that was making money trading carbon. You can read it here:

http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/article.people.prof ...

After reading this story, I would love to hear Gar and others poke holes in the process. And, though it won't happen, I would very much like to see how we might explain his reservations to Beatrice.

It is all very well and good to remain on the level of theory. But we live in a real world, a real world, with real people: poor people, rich people, and everything in between. We need real attempts at a solution, not perfectionist rhetoric.  If we are to solve this huge global problem, we need to try innovative, inventive, and useful approaches that aim at modifying the economic system in the right way. Yes, let's look at taxes, but let's not throw the carbon trading baby out with the bath water. Otherwise, you can be sure this will prove to be a truly intractable problem.On At present, offsets are impossible to verify posted 2 years, 9 months ago 11 Responses