The idea of guardianship for future generation is good. The depletion of metals will soon hit us with crises like oil is doing now (or once the economy picks up again).

The difference is that oil is replaceable by abundant and relatively inexpensive alternatives.

Metals have generally low substitutability, making the crises potentially much worse. Cap-and-trade does nothing about them. We need to adopt a structural strategy such as the one proposed by Henderson at A Structural Strategy for Global Warming AND the Environment (lots of new material added in May).

The approach covers not only fossil fuels and global warming but also the conservation of metals and many other environmental issues. It is comprehensive.

Tags: cap-and-trade problems and alternative solutions

And it is true that Climate Change, however it changes, will beyond a doubt affect many poor people as compared to the rich.  For example, if a rich man loses a house into the ocean because of erosion and rising seas, or some other calamnity, well there's insurance and you just move on and buy something else.  To the poor family that lives in a shack, you've lost about everything in the world and have absolutely nothing left. And nobody wants thousands of "eco-migrants" who don't have any money.

Now that's a rights issue. 

So what I'm detecting is some of the "Smug Hippie Effect" where smart people talk about defending future generations, or people who are portrayed as being unable to speak for themselves - hey hire me, I can be your mouthpiece!  It's a problem like Big Tobacco, let's start a tort case and file for bazillions of dollars! 

If you see my point, all that evades the inescapable fact that climate change will cause environmental injustice, and it is a nasty, dirty, low-down thing that nobody really wants to get into.  Typhoons in Myanmar, tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, deforestation of the Amazon, the environmental problems of Haiti and China ... the list goes on and on.  Our ability to really DO anything about it is rather pathetic, aside from some immediate emergency response.  What happens is that we declare victory and the poor men, women, and children still don't have any money, homes, jobs, or anything - often they end up in refugee camps and are treated like vermin.

Do such poor, displaced people have "rights"?

Nothing is ever easy because there are cultural, political, and often religious issues that are intertwined.  But if you subscribe to the notion that climate change will indeed force tens of thousands away from their homes, yet THEY had no part in making all those greenhouse gases, I can see a debating point - that somehow we "owe" them something. 

In case you missed the subtext, many "deniers" simply don't want to admit any anthropogenic cause to climate change because large polluters could be exposed to legal liabilities that could amount to billions of dollars.  Gosh, that's the same argument about why we shouldn't go after the abusers at the Abu Garhaib (sp) Prison in Iraq, or extraordinary rendition, because it could cost people millions of dollars. 

Forgive me if I'm getting down on the efforts to promote human rights issues in the context of climate change.  But it's a horribly dirty affair nobody really knows how to fix.  You can't take 50 million people and say "you need to move away from the growing desert and rising seas."  It takes M-O-N-E-Y that these poor people simply do not have.  I wish I had some kind of advice but ... I really don't.

That being said, there are economically feasible solutions to environmental problems. Revenue-neutral taxation is essentially a free tool for the environment. It is also scalable, enabling us to implement is progressively and would not run into many of the problems that cap-and-trade would.

You can see an outline of such a strategy at Cap-and-Trade Alternatives

,how it would work, its benefits, etc.