First Name | David |
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Last Name | Schonbrunn |
Email Address | David@Schonbrunn.org |
Affiliation | |
Subject | The Alternatives Analysis is Flawed |
Comment | The rationale for discarding Alternative 5, the carbon fee, is entirely based on conjecture. Cap-and-trade is asserted to provide certainty as to emissions reductions. This is blatantly incorrect, as Europe learned recently. The initiation of a cap-and-trade system requires the development of vast new complex institutions, and depends on highly educated, highly paid professionals, operating without transparency. This is a recipe ripe for manipulation. Consider the sub-prime mortgage and credit default swap crisis as a foretaste of the shennanigans that cap-and-trade are likely to bring. That crisis has taught us that a system that can only be understood by specialized PhDs is not robust enough to base an economy on. The very popularity of cap-and-trade with the business community ought to raise red flags as to whether the public interest will be endangered. A carbon tax, on the other hand, will be very simple to implement. The institutions are mostly in place already. While more accountants will need to be hired to assume the larger responsibilities of a carbon tax system, nothing exotic is needed. It will be easy to catch bad actors. And should monitoring determine that the trend line of GHG reductions is not steep enough, the tax can easily be adjusted. This isn't rocket science. Cap-and-trade, on the other hand, IS rocket science. I request that Paragraph G on page J-87, the analysis for Alternative 5, be withdrawn and be recirculated with a conclusion consistent with the comments above. |
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Date and Time Comment Was Submitted | 2008-11-19 01:25:02 |
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