Dec 13, 2007 2:09 pm US/Eastern
Bloomberg: Carbon Tax Should Replace Carbon Trade
Carbon Cap-And-Trade Industry Vulnerable To Corruption
BALI, INDONESIA (AP) ―
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at a U.N. climate conference drawing hundreds of emissions traders, said Thursday the growing carbon cap-and-trade industry is vulnerable to "special interests, corruption, inefficiencies," and should be replaced by straight carbon taxes.
Speaking of global warming, Bloomberg said, "Most experts would agree that the way to solve the problem is with a carbon tax."
The Kyoto Protocol, requiring 37 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural emissions, has given rise in Europe and elsewhere to carbon cap-and-trade systems, under which businesses that don't use up quotas of emission allowances sell them to others who need them to overshoot their ceilings.
That in turn has given rise to a multibillion-dollar global industry of brokers, analysts and project managers dealing in such carbon credits and "green" projects that produce them.
The two-week U.N. conference, ending Friday, has attracted more than 300 participants from one emissions-trading association alone.
The meeting is to establish a negotiating track for a new agreement to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012.
Bloomberg, who addresses the conference Friday as a representative of the world's local governments, told a meeting with environmentalists Thursday that carbon trading "is attractive to many politicians because it doesn't have that three-letter word 'tax'."
"But it's a very inefficient way to accomplish the same thing that a carbon tax accomplishes," he said. "It leaves itself open to special interests, corruption, inefficiencies."
At the conference Friday, Bloomberg is expected to tout his new plan to reduce global-warming emissions in New York City by 30 percent by 2030 by, among other measures, improving energy efficiency in buildings, requiring taxi fleets to convert to hybrid vehicles, and levying a fee on drivers entering Manhattan business districts.
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