Chicago Climate Exchange

We had the vice president of Chicago Climate Exchange come to give a talk for our annual invitational lecture series today. This is a market based method to reduce greenhouse gases. The system is run on a mercantile exchange method. Every participant is audited in order to determine a baseline for their emissions. The total amount of emissions of the participants is determined, a goal is determined to lower these total emissions over a given time, and all participants are given points based on their baseline emissions. A goal is set for every year, a credit is given if the goal is met, and a debit, which must be made up by buying credits, is given to those members that don't make their goal. The idea looks pretty good, but there are problems. The first that I thought of when I heard this is that this is a market and markets can be manipulated. I bring up as an example, Enron's energy market and the manipulations that they did to drive up prices in California. Another possible problem is the fact that the present administration is anti-environment and the drive to reduce pollution is greatly reduced. It really isn't in a polluter's fiscal best interest to reduce their emissions. Finally, this point was brought up by my father when I talked to him about it and I thought it was pretty good so I thought I would include it. Pollution is not static and if several polluters in a region decide it is fiscally better to buy credits than to improve their emissions, the air quality downwind of these polluters does not improve, even if there are polluters in the polluted area that have improved substantially. The Climate Exchange might work as a part of an overall pollution reduction program but it has some serious problems on its own.

Music: Planet Telex - Radiohead
Movie: Dead Like Me (vol. 1) (5 Stars)
Book: America (the Book) by the writers of the Daily Show
Iraq: February - 9
Total - 1449