Carbon Credits, Cap and Trade - Same As Rationing

Cap and trade is nothing more than a top down administration rationing scheme imposed on the population which the rations can subsequently be traded.

Sounds good, you get carbon credits for everything you do, car, washing machine, heating, lighting, the TV, you get carbon credits and it encompasses all those things. No problem if you don't blow your budget. But then, you need to buy more, form someone who will sell theirs, Sounds like rationing, and trading rations doesn't it. How much otherwise productive time would be spent on figuring out your rations, buying or selling your leftovers or covering your needs. It's a bureaucratic time waster, a bureaucrat's wet dream. A make work scheme that even the old Soviet Russia could be proud of.

After the disastrous recent election in the UK, looks like the UK government's plans to tax the peons to death has been stuffed back on the shelf, for now.

What it really does do is reduce daily life to trading carbon credits. If this sounds a lot like the movie plot for "Soylent Green" it does because it is. One way to get more supply, is shorten lifespan and recycle. The first baby steps, no different that standing in line in Democrat Jimmy Carter's America and trying to get your five gallons of gas allotment on your designated day.

It sucks...

One thing it's not is free market or freedom.

When you apply the carbon cap and trade scheme to power companies you have the same effect. Some power companies will get rich off their excess carbon credits, others will go broke trying to buy enough to serve their customers electricity needs. Why not just shut down and sell carbon credits, to hell with the customers and their needs for electricity. Well, do that and the government will take over your company, yes that is what Democrat Jimmy Carter did, and the results were spectacular ... FAILURE and near failure of the US economy.

In the end, it's rationing, rationing BTUs ( energy units -- a gallon of gasoline has about 130,000 BTU ) pure and simple. Clinton tried this the first year he was in office with the BTU tax. At the time, it was just a tax for tax sake, now they have woven the "save the Earth" mantra into the tax and spend mentality of Washington. Save the Earth, as if we could.

One curiosity, ethanol and other renewable energy is not taxed, as if they give off no CO2 -- I wonder how this is explained, because you have to be pretty ignorant to not understand that ethanol when burned, gives off CO2 just like gasoline.

And how exactly does this save the Earth? If you wanted to save the Earth, just slap a tax on it and let the market decide. And that is the ultimate problem, the tax would be instantly visible, but the carbon credit crap looks like a fuzzy pipe dream, because everyone would think they could scheme their way to a successful outcome. They thought this in the Communist Soviet Union, which is why the normal state was the shelves at the grocery store were empty, and people wore rags for clothes.

The thing with taxes, they only go up, never down and never go away. Once they are there, you are sunk, pay or else.