The carbon credit plan does NOT track the same thing for everyone, so Brazil can claim carbon credits for planting crops (destroying the rainforest to get cropland) and we can claim credit for using biofuels. Both of us get credit for destroying forests.

Do you have proof that is how the carbon credits will work? I know a lot of the current credits aren't particularly science driven but current generation bioefuels for example have been shown quite clearly to be net Carbon positive (i.e. bad). REDD particularly is forest focused.

blueshift:

Do you have proof that is how the carbon credits will work? I know a lot of the current credits aren't particularly science driven but current generation bioefuels for example have been shown quite clearly to be net Carbon positive (i.e. bad). REDD particularly is forest focused.

there was an article in the paper just a couple days ago on this very subject, and how the credits aren't universally dictated, that in effect each country can choose what it wants to measure. One of us can google it...

Which paper?

Wall street Journal, no more than 1-2 weeks ago.

This?

If mature forests are cleared to make room for biofuel-growing farms, then the carbon that would otherwise accumulate in those forests ought to be counted on ethanol's balance sheet as well.

Cap-and-trade programs exacerbate the problem because developed countries (where emissions are putatively capped) get credit for reductions from ethanol—despite the fact that their biofuels are generally grown in developing countries (where emissions aren't capped). So if Malaysians burn down a rain forest to grow palm oil that ends up in German biodiesel, Malaysia doesn't count the land-use emissions and Germany doesn't count the tail-pipe emissions.

Exactly, thanks for the effort!

Sure thing. I don't like the tone of the article or that its relegated to the op-ed section, but still its highlighting an important issue. We have to get the science, the economics and the accounting right. Which is why it would be nice to have a few Republicans on board to balance out farm state dem interests.

if cap and trade passes, I personally will likely make out like a bandit. We have a 200 acre hobby farm, and being personally conservation minded, we qualify as a level III csp farm.

European cap and trade per acre is about 50$, compared to 5$ through Chicago in the U.S. I don't bother with it now, because who needs more red tape, but if cap and trade becomes law? I'm not going to say no to an extra 10 grand, I'll tell you that much. "someone", of course, has to pay for that windfall... the "someone" being the taxpayer.

It's things like that which make many believe Global Warming is a scam.

Climate Change is not a scam. Note I use the term Climate Change because it is a more accurate term for it.

I agree with your sentiments in that all the activity around it makes my BS meter shoot through the roof. In truth science does not work well in the limelight because the facts are often far duller and far less obvious than people would like.

I've SEEN and worked with some of the tempreture change data and frankly any conclusion drawn from it is riddled with assumptions and estimations. While a trained scientist can make sense of it, general public cannot. Public statements on the subject are highly irresponsible and only made worse by the glory hounds who latch onto it for their own cynical purposes.

It's improperly evaluating the impact of biofuels. If biofuels are properly credited with land-use change, then they are typically only offset ~5% of the carbon from traditional petrofuels.

If the European Union was to (properly) credit bio-ethanol for reducing emissions by ~150 g CO2/liter ethanol... then that would only offset the price of ethanol by ~3 cents/gallon. That hardly is enough incentive to make the European Union (or a theoretical U.S. cap-and-trade influenced market) go out and buy a product that has far higher costs/MJ than traditional gasoline.

In short, cap-and-trade isn't the problem... improperly evaluating and advantaging ethanol is.

Our country - which does not have cap-and-trade - has also chosen to seriously advantage ethanol (through enormous subsidies)... We actually advantage it more than the EU's improperly evaluated tax credit.

;)

So this doesn't really have anything to do with cap-and-trade at all.