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Green market hustlers.

Article Excerpt
On the opening panel of the Arctic Science Summit Week, Jeff Miotke announced, "Climate change policy must be based on sound silence." It was a poignant and telling slip of the tongue. Miotke, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary of Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs, joked that his error might have "just cost me my job." Then he promptly corrected himself: "sound science not silence." The audience at the March 2007 meeting, a veritable who's who of leading polar scientists, burst into laughter.

Miotke's Freudian slip was bittersweet given the failure of leadership on climate change from Washington in general and the White House in particular. The Bush administration's legacy of denials has morphed into present-day foot-dragging. In November 2006 the shrill pronouncements of President Bush and his advisors prompted outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to note that climate skeptics "are out of step, out of arguments, and out of time."

While scientists agree that climate change is human caused, there is no consensus on the litany of proposals to check this leading and growing threat to humanity. There is, however, a widely held assumption that the market might be able to rescue us from climate catastrophe. Prominent economists like Sir Nicholas Stern and former World Bank chief economist Larry Summers, a growing list of high profile American politicians (including Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Richardson, and Eliot Spitzer to name a few), and an Oscar recipient in the person of former Vice President Al Gore are all advocating market approaches.

Most prominent among these market-based strategies is carbon cap-and-trade. The Kyoto Protocol, in particular, endorsed this approach as a necessary tool to help avert climate catastrophe. But neither cap-and-trade nor its other market-based ilk will bring us back from the edge. Indeed, the market approaches and the green business leaders who are promoting them might be pushing us closer to catastrophe.

Cap-and-Trade

Carbon trading works as follows. A group of countries at the global level or a group of states caps its carbon emissions at a certain level ("the cap") and then a government agency issues permits to industries to emit a stated amount of carbon dioxide over a stated period of time. Companies can then trade these credits in a market, or via an exchange,...

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