The Story of Cap and Trade
December 1st, 2009The debut of the new animated film The Story of Cap and Trade. Host Daphne Wysham, who recently penned an op-ed for The Huffington Post on cap and trade, speaks to narrator Annie Leonard and and the founder of Free Range Studios, Jonah Sachs, the animator. The Story of Cap and Trade is featured in The New York Times and creating a stir in the blogosphere.
Then Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi joins us to discuss how the investment bank Goldman Sachs stands to make a killing in the carbon market. And, how activists are planning to demonstrate at the upcoming Copenhagen climate meeting. We speak to Kim Wasserman, the coordinator of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Nadine Bloch of the Mobilization for Climate Justice, and David Solnit, who helped to organize the Seattle demonstrations and is the co-author of the book The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle.
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December 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Your introduction to the Taibbi interview was to describe cap and trade as “what many are calling a worldwide Ponzi scheme”.
Obviously, if you believe this, you are saying that President Obama and all the other leaders meeting in Copenhagen this month are criminals arguing about how to divide the spoils. So, just as obviously, you don’t believe cap and trade schemes are Ponzi schemes. You are associating the words “Ponzi scheme” with “cap and trade” in the same sentence, end of discussion, moving right on to the interview, because you intend to smear.
I suppose this is just more of the “creative, in-depth reporting that both informs and helps build the clean-energy community needed to solve the problem” that Earthbeat supposedly exists to do.
You actually asked Taibbi whether he knew if the non profit environment groups lobbying on Capitol Hill for the climate legislation now in the Senate have been bought off by Goldman Sachs.
This is the kind of question that can’t possibly do anything else other than to “build the clean-energy community needed”, “to solve the problem”. I can just tell.
Why not interview Bernie Madoff as well, and ask him if the billions he stole from groups such as Jewish charities went into buying off non-profit groups lobbying for climate action on Capitol Hill?
Why not name some groups?
Who are these groups that you think take money from Goldman Sachs to lobby for Ponzi schemes while telling their environmentalist supporters they are actually trying to do something about one of their deepest concerns, i.e. climate change? Tell us. What’s with the smear aimed at all supporters of the cap and trade legislation? Why not find someone who knows something about cap and trade so we might learn why you don’t like it instead? What is Taibbi doing on your show?
Taibbi’s idea of the history of cap and trade is laughable. As he said to you at the end: “to be perfectly honest, the cap and trade section of the piece that I wrote about Goldman Sachs was not the one I spent the most time on”.
According to him, at the dawn of creation there was the idea of a carbon tax, but then, “over the last decade or so, the Democratic Party” came up with this cap and trade stuff. When discussing Republicans, the fact that the majority of Republican supporters do not believe climate change is an issue did not come up.
As he claimed the very idea of cap and trade came from Goldman Sachs to the Democratic Party to Congress today, Taibbi ignores the entire history of the subject.
What is it to him that the first big successful implementation in the world of cap and trade was the US Acid Rain Program starting in 1995, or that the negotiations in Kyoto adopted cap and trade only because the US delegation pressed the issue successfully although the US failed to follow through by having the Senate ratify. According to Taibbi it would have been carbon tax that policy circles would have been considering at that time. He talks as if the EU cap and trade system does not exist.
So, leaving history behind: Taibbi would have us believe that the carbon market created by the cap and trade system in the US will be “not policed at all” and “would really just give a subsidy to the banks that would be managing the market”. He actually doesn’t believe this, as he makes clear later.
Actually, Taibbi tells us, the carbon market will do a bit more than just give a subsidy to the banks. It will be just like the oil, corn, and soybeans markets, which actually transfer oil corn and soybeans from producers to consumers in addition to subsizing Goldman Sachs and whatever other evils Taibbi is concerned about.
According to Taibbi, “there are supposed to be very very fixed rules about the amount of speculative activity in the market vrs the amount of real investors”, because if there isn’t, you get a “price craze like what we had last summer with the oil prices”.
Taibbi not only doesn’t understand cap and trade, he shows us here he hasn’t a clue about commodities markets either. Where are the “very very fixed rules”? Just try to find them. There is a debate going on about whether to implement some rules about who can invest in commodities, but Taibbi would have us believe the rules are already in place. How could we have had a “price craze” over oil last year if there were all these rules? If there were rules and a price craze happened anyway why is there no call for enforcement of the existing rules? Why do we instead hear that there is a call to implement some rules?
Is there any possibility there could be a grain of truth in those stories that demand for oil exceeded supply as the Chinese dramatically expanded their economy? I suppose not. Everyone knows there is no limit to the amount of oil that can be produced, right, Earthbeat?
Taibbi then admits that cap and trade will actually force the price of emitting CO2 up. That is what the system is designed to do, that is what the people supporting it want it to do.
Taibbi wants the price forced up by a tax, and he wants the money to go back to the people it was taxed from. Cap and trade supporters say if the price is forced up by their system, it allows emitters to use markets to choose which among them can most cheaply reduce emissions so that in the end, they say, the overall reduction in emissions is accomplished at a lower cost than if a tax was used. There are arguments on both sides.
All I care about is if the accumulated level of GHG in the atmosphere is reduced to a level consistent with maintaining the planetary system I inherited.
I don’t much care to listen to people smearing other people talking about criminal activity talking as if it is some kind of crime to collect a commission while facilitating trading activity, as they exhibit their ignorance on the topic of discussion, i.e. cap and trade.