Emissions trading scheme.... (crock!)

I've always thought it was a crock but an article by Andrew Simms was used in New Scientist a few issues back explaining pretty much why it'll actually ensure the continued spewing of harmful emission from the worst polluters.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227046.200-carbon-trading-wont-stop-climate-change.html

In addition, to show the ludicrous state of effort put into actually moving towards any solutions of the problem, New Scientist pointed out that the UK spent almost 20% of it's GDP on propping up the financial sector failings yet, in the same time, only committed 0.0083% of GDP to green economic stimulus/technology/research/incentives.

With that sort of effort nothing will change in the next 20 years.

I don't believe we should focus too much on working out the correct tax rate on the "social cost of carbon". Rather we simply need to raise a pigovian tax on carbon, sufficient enough to make emitting C02 more costly while allowing us revenue to subsidize less environmentally damaging alternatives, which are typically more expensive. The price may still need to be adjusted accordingly over the years, but it's still far more efficient than emissions trading schemes and should bring the cost of markets investing into alternatives down.

I'd prefer we had a quota system for certain industries like power production/supply (which are essential to everyone) which have zero real motivation to do anything different because simply they're all basically in the same basket and will merely pass any costs directly onto the end consumer. This equals price rises and nothing else changes. What is the point?

There is no doubt about this, both systems will pass costs onto the consumer, but if we can make alternatives more affordable by subsidizing them, those entities which don't adopt them, will find their customers moving to other entities which do, because they will be able to drop their prices accordingly.

Nothing like offering a cheaper option to the consumer to gain market share eh?