Giving Kyoto the Ol’ Heave-Ho!
The folks at the Wall Street Journal are brilliant (most days) and I find myself reading the WSJ in print and online every day. When a topic hits the opinion page, it’s usually a great piece of analysis.
Today was no exception.
‘Kyoto’s Long Goodbye’ is a great piece on exactly what I was trying to convey in my post this past Tuesday – Kyoto was D.O.A. because of its inherent flaws. C’mon folks – it’s a TAX! It took some countries who were early supporters of Kyoto to learn what most Americans knew at the outset:
The irony is that Kyoto has handed them every reason not to participate. Europe knew all along that it couldn’t meet its quotas, so it created an out in “offsets.” A British factory, say, buys a credit to pay for basic efficiency improvements in a Chinese coal plant, like installing smokestack scrubbers. This is a tax on the Brits to make Chinese industries more competitive. Sweet deal if you can get it.
You see, if you are successful as a country, you are penalized by having to pay a ‘cap & trade’ offset and the money goes to your competitor in another country; a country that has no unions, EPA, etc. How the heck can you compete with that?
Ok, so it may have taken a few years before the eco-friendly lightbulbs to go off in their heads, but at least they did. Kyoto is pie-in-the-sky.
WSJ: Kyoto’s Long Goodbye
TAE FLASHBACK – Kyoto Lite?
